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Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Click here to see previous installments.)

Today’s question: How do you decide which meetings/conferences to attend?

Jessica Marshall, freelance journalist:
The simplest answer to this question is, “Those that come to town.” Minneapolis-St. Paul hosts a reasonable, though not overwhelming, number of conferences, which provides me a chance to attend meetings other reporters might not travel for. The University of Minnesota and other local colleges also host symposia and workshops that can be worth attending.

Beyond that, as a freelancer, I know I need to attend a couple of meetings a year for my social sanity and to keep my three professional-looking outfits from getting too lonely in the closet, but I’d also like to be pretty certain there will be new science to mine for features or news stories. The American Geophysical Union meeting is a nice mix because plenty of press attend to socialize with, but there is also more than enough research to check out. Other big meetings like the Ecological Society of America offer a similar balance. Small meetings can be great for getting an exclusive story or if you are really specializing in a beat, but you need to vet them more closely ahead of time to make sure there’s something there before footing the bill for travel.

On the other hand, if what you’re really looking forward to about attending a conference is a hotel room to yourself, maybe you need a “non-conference.” I wrote about mine recently over at The Science Writers’ Handbook blog.

Tina Hesman Saey, molecular biology writer, Science News:
Since I’m a beat reporter, there are a few musts on my list of meetings, but those also meet my criteria for a great meeting. I evaluate meetings based on news value, potential to find feature stories and the opportunity to make contacts. It’s a jackpot when you find all three at the same meeting. Small meetings, especially those that don’t even have a press room, are often places to meet researchers and discuss ideas. Those tend to be meetings that are also fertile ground for growing feature ideas, although not always big on news value. If you do find news at a small meeting, chances are you will break the story as no other press are likely to be there.

Closed meetings, such as Keystone conferences and meetings at Cold Spring Harbor, can be tricky for news reporters. On the one hand, absolutely everything will be new and unpublished; it’s one of the conditions for presenting. On the down side, you have to get permission from the speaker to write about their work. I find many researchers are open to letting me cover their research. Generally, those presenters who say it is alright to tweet also give permission for news coverage. But even if you can’t cajole a researcher into letting you write a story, you still have a great overview of the papers that will make an appearance in the next year or so. Because those meetings are small they are also excellent source-building venues. Sometimes I choose a meeting based on location: if it is held in DC where I live and work, I will go.

Milka Kostic, Senior Editor, Cell Press:
This year I am breaking all the records: by the time 2013 is all said and done I will attend eight scientific conferences! As a scientific editor, one of my on-going responsibilities, beyond the hands on day to day work of assigning stories from journalists for the front of the book sections, selecting papers for peer review, and overseeing the review and decision process, is staying current with the fields that my journals are publishing in (structural and chemical biology), building relationships with scientists doing the research, learning about new directions research might be taking, and increasing the visibility of the journals. Attending conferences is one of the most effective ways in hitting many of these “birds” with one stone, and therefore always on top of my priority list when setting goals for the year.

I make the most of my travel plans for the following year in October of the year before, as my calendar tends to fill up quickly, and the conferences that I focus on are by and large scientific meetings focusing on specific topics covered in the journals I edit. But, I also try to include a conference on a topic that although not currently in the scope of what I publish, is of growing general importance, and from time to time a conference focusing on science editing, publishing, or science policy. Besides the topic balance that I aim for, which narrows down the choices considerably, I am also limited by my travel budget as well as time, so in a typical year the “October” list includes 5 meetings, most US-based, and has one or two TBD spots, as I often find out about interesting meetings while attending other meetings. Finally, from time to time it happens that the Boston area, where I work and play, hosts a conference I am interested in. Since this cuts down my travel expenses considerably, those meetings move to the top of my priority list.

In terms of the ideal format, because the networking is such an important component of attending a conference, my favorites are those that have about 150 attendees, are 4-5 days long, have built in social hours and joined meals, and take place in relatively remote locations. This usually ensures that by the end of the conference I have had an opportunity to meet and chat with almost everyone, and even make fast friends.

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Image by Tom Page via Flickr.

Today we continue our series Single Best. We asked top journalists and editors to give us their single best piece of advice — given or taken, their single best idea, reporting trip or memorable experience. Here, science journalist (and TON advisory board member) David Dobbs explains how he found an ending to his e-book, My Mother’s Lover.

Dobbs is an author and journalist who writes about science and culture for The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Wired, National Geographic, and other magazines. My Mother’s Lover, published by The Atavist, was a #1 Kindle-Single bestseller. He is the author of three other books and is currently writing a book about the genetic and cultural roots of temperament (working title: The Orchid and the Dandelion.)

Videography by Evan Howell and made possible with a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

What I’m working on: I’m in a period of transition period right now. I spent the last three years writing a book (Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts), and I’m just coming off my book tour. So right now I’m trying to figure out what I want to do next. I’d like to write another book before too long, but I’m itching to get back to freelancing for a while. I have a long list of story ideas that I haven’t had time to pursue, so now I’m starting to comb through them — figuring out which ideas still get me excited and which ones might actually have legs. I’ve got a few pitches in the works, which I hope will become actual assignments soon.

Where I work: In the living room of my Brooklyn apartment. I usually work just sitting on the couch, with my notes and papers spread out all over the coffee table. I have to be careful if I get up to do something though, because when I return, I may discover that my dog, Milo, has stolen my spot. (See photo.) In any case, the arrangement’s not ideal, but I’m about to move to a new apartment, where I’ll have my own dedicated home office space. I’m looking forward to that.

Daily routine: Get up, walk the dog, make coffee. Then I sit down and read my e-mails and do a quick read of the news. I scan some stories and headlines, but then I also open dozens upon dozens of stories in new tabs and set them aside to read later. (Often while I’m eating lunch.) I usually work for a few hours and then break to go to the gym (when I’m feeling motivated) and eat lunch. Then back to work for the rest of the day. I cook a lot — one of the great perks of working at home is that I can start something cooking for dinner and then go back to work for a while.

Most productive part of my day: For actual work work, it’s probably those first few hours in the morning. But then I also have a second burst of productivity after dinner. That tends to be when I sit down to catch up on all my e-mails.

Most essential ritual or habit: I’m a list-maker. And though almost everything else in my life is digital, I still really like making to do lists by hand. The very last thing I do at the end of each work day is look at my hand-written to do list. I cross off what I accomplished that day, add new items if necessary, and figure out what I need to get done the next day. I find that this really helps me “turn off” at night — I feel a lot less stressed out when I go to bed knowing what my priorities are for the following day.

Mobile device: iPhone

Computer: MacBook

Essential software/apps/productivity tools: Someone at an NASW conference introduced me to Scrivener a few years ago, and I became an immediate convert. I love it–it was hugely helpful when writing my book. I’ve also just started using DevonThink, which I continue to hear great things about, but there’s definitely a learning curve. I’m still figuring out how to use it. Feedly’s my new RSS reader (RIP Google Reader), and I use Pinboard to bookmark links.

Favorite time waster/procrastination habit: Right now, since it’s so nice out, it’s probably walking the dog. The good news for Milo is that he’s getting far more walks than he needs every day.

My reading habits: I read every night before bed–for at least an hour and sometimes longer. I subscribe to two weekly magazines (The New Yorker and New York), and I have huge anxiety about getting behind on them. So I read those right away–the first few nights of the week tend to be my magazine reading nights. I’m also an Instapaper addict, so I usually spend a few nights just catching up on longform stories I’ve saved on Instapaper. Then, with whatever nights I have left in the week (and before the next week’s magazines begin to arrive!), I try to read books. I just finished I just finished The Good Nurse (by Charles Graeber) and read Tom’s River (by Dan Fagin) before that. Both great reads. But I like fiction, too. The last great novel I read was The Age of Miracles (by Karen Thompson Walker). I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader (I was the kid who’d bring a book to a sleepover), and it both thrills and saddens me that there are more great books in the world than I will ever have the chance to read. The one downside of not having to commute to work is that I don’t get as much reading done as I once did.

Sleep schedule: Some people seem to function fine on 6 or 7 hours of sleep a night. I am not one of them. I really need a good 8 in order to be a real person the next day. I try to get to bed by 1 and then get up by 9. I know — it’s a late start to the day, but, left to my own devices, I gravitate toward this later schedule. I usually work for a bit in the evenings, after dinner, to make up for time lost in the morning.

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Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, BBC Future, SEED, Discover, Popular Science, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. Her new book, Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, was published in March 2013. Emily lives in Brooklyn, New York with her dog, Milo.

Amanda Martinez

On dozens of islands throughout the world, a little-known group of conservationists is waging a high-stakes war against invasive species in an effort to restore frayed and altered ecosystems to their once-upon-a-time states. But this idyllic outcome has a controversial cost: the outright killing of hundreds and sometimes thousands of animals to spare endangered and endemic ones.

In Battle at the End of Eden, the first e-book published by The Atlantic, Amanda Rose Martinez traces the development of the non-profit group Island Conservation and explores the moral, ethical, and ecological dilemmas of the group’s controversial actions, the collateral damage, how we value one species over another, and the role of human tinkering in nature.

[Battle at the End of Eden was published as a Kindle Single on December 23, 2012.]

Here, Martinez talks to TON guest contributor T. DeLene Beeland about how she crafted the story of this epic ecological battle:

Where did the idea for this story come from?

I first heard about Island Conservation’s work a few years back when I was reporting a story in Santa Cruz, California, where IC is based. The idea that you could take these islands where the ecosystem had been completely altered by humans and the animals they brought with them, and essentially restore them to the point that there was no trace that people had ever been there — this was fascinating to me. I met with one of the scientists who co-founded IC and the photos he had of some of these islands before and after restoration were so dramatic, especially on islands that had invasive goats, which can just maul a forest until you’re literally left with terrain that looks like the surface of Mars.

One “before” picture, I remember, was of a tiny atoll off the Mexican coast in the late 1950s. Invasive pigs had eaten or driven off nearly all of the island’s seabird colonies, which had numbered in the tens of thousands. So in the ’50s “before” photo, you see this expansive field of hay-colored grass, empty, save for three lone birds standing in the middle. The “after” picture, though, taken some 40 years after the pigs were killed, looks like a just-shaken snow globe, if the snow was birds. They fill the sky and stretch across the island as far as the eye can see, and the ground, covered in guano, is bluish-white.

Early in my reporting, I came across a video taken by biologists studying invasive mice on an island in the South Atlantic that starkly illustrated why some island species are so vulnerable to invasive animals. The video shows this big albatross chick sitting in its nest, while house mice swarm around it, chewing into it, eating it alive. It just sits there, blinking, because it hasn’t evolved any capacity to even perceive the mice as dangerous. We’re so used to reading stories about irreparable environmental catastrophe — landscapes lost and species going extinct. The fact that you could resurrect colonies and forests, saving these one-of-a-kind species and essentially staging an ecological do-over was compelling. It seemed noble. I thought: how has the story of what this group is doing not been told?

IC’s method of conservation raises some ethical issues. Which ones piqued your interest the most?

Well it turns out that restoring the island usually means killing populations of the invasive rats, cats, goats, rabbits, etc. in their entirety. This, along with the fact that some of the methods used to dispense with the invaders can be gruesome, exposed a pretty thorny ethical dilemma: Do we have the right to sacrifice some species to save others? Some say: We brought the animals, unleashing their destruction. If we’re able, it’s our moral imperative to remove them, especially when the existence of a species is at risk. Others say: A life is a life, and we have no right to value one life over another, end of story. Who’s to decide? Meanwhile, this is all happening in the context of human-caused biodiversity and extinction crises whose ecological losses are on track to equal or exceed those of prior mass extinction events. High stakes. IC had been sued by animal rights activists, and there’d even been a sabotage attempt on one of the islands. As a result, the organization had been keeping a low profile as far as media coverage was concerned.

Due to the sensitive nature of their work, did you have trouble getting access to the sites or  to the IC scientists?

When I asked to write the piece, I’d come along at just the right time. IC scientists had spent years developing their techniques and were ready to scale up their efforts and start working on a bunch of islands. They knew they would draw media attention eventually, so they were open to a story.

And then the plot thickened. Some of the islands where IC plans to work have substantial human populations. (They’d initially worked mostly on uninhabited islands). This raised the stakes again: IC would now have to convince people to go along with its eradication projects, sometimes giving up livestock or pets and changing lifestyle habits. This brought up the opportunity to ask: Well what are ecosystems for? Humans are the dominant species. Do we have some kind of obligation to share environments with other species that may or may not provide a quantifiable contribution to our quality of life? Or as the planet’s clear ecological winners, do we have carte blanche to homogenize every ecosystem, tricking it out with the plants, animals, and landscapes that optimize our comfort?

So you uncovered some compelling ethical questions. Was it hard to find characters to tell the story?

There were great characters: scientists and grad students who would spend years living on some inhospitable, remote spit of land covered in bird crap and commit themselves against staggering logistical, biological, and social odds, to closing what to a remote oceanic island and its endemic species amounted to Pandora’s Box. I was curious to meet them, spend time with them and understand their work and their relationship to it.

Plus, the more I dug into the story, the more I uncovered these great scenes, like a fisherman putting a goat on a Galápagos island as an act of eco-terrorism, or IC scientists driving a van full of falcons up the California coast to a bird sanctuary to safely ride out an eradication, or an animal rights activist sailing an inflatable dinghy across major shipping channels to spread rat poison antidote on a U.S. National Park island.

To me, the story had everything.

You published this as an e-book through The Atlantic and it was also chosen as their very first e-book. Tell us how this arrangement came about and what the process was like.

I had been working with an editor at The Atlantic for the better part of a year on the piece, which was originally intended for the print magazine. But it became apparent that the story could really be expanded to its benefit. The idea to publish it as an e-book was theirs, and I was very excited by the prospect — to have much more room and to be able to write the story to its natural length — it was decadent. Otherwise, the process was the same as that for a print feature.

Were you paid as if you were writing a magazine piece, and did they cover your travel costs? Will you receive any royalties?

I was both paid a fee and will receive royalties from the Kindle Single sales, and yes, The Atlantic did pay for travel.

You did some traveling for the reporting, to Anacapa Island off the coast of California and the Galapagos Islands. How did visiting these places affect your perspective of IC’s work and their critics?

I’d have to say first that visiting these islands gave me an authentic sense of the audacity of IC’s effort. The landscape is treacherous, complex, and dense. On Floreana Island in the Galápagos, for example, we were driving up to the highlands past these vast expanses of overgrown, unkempt, thick vegetation, some of which was native, some invasive, and all providing an infinite variety of places for animals to live and hide. On Anacapa, the landscape was totally different. There are fewer plants; it’s mostly steep cliffs and rocky ledges in every direction, which are pitted with all sorts of crevices — again, seemingly impossible-to-target places. The idea that you could send out a team of hunters or have helicopters fly over and spray poison pellets with the expectation that you would reach every last animal — especially given that there is zero room for error in these eradications — it’s at the edges of the imagination.

Also, when you go through an epic sojourn to get to an island — going from a prop plane to a ferry to a bus ride to a supply boat to a smaller boat, maneuverable enough to get you close enough to climb onto a shore that has no pier, you get a real sense for how infeasible it would be to transport invasive animals safely to the mainland. And then, again, on Floreana, to actually see how people there live, to see their cats and chickens roaming around, and know that those conditions would have to change during and post-eradication; and then also to talk to inhabitants, who, on the one hand, are wary of these strangers coming in, telling them that they have to change some habits regarding pets and how they farm in order to save some mockingbird that’s essentially never been on the island in their lifetimes, but on the other, seem willing to give the eradication a try so long as it results in increased tourism … you get a sense both of the imposition that island residents might feel mixed with their hope for better quality of life, as well as the challenge IC scientists face in trying to justify their work to island communities. All of these experiences greatly heightened my understanding of the controversies surrounding IC’s efforts.

What were some of the challenges you faced in reporting, researching, or writing this story?

For reporting, I was originally scheduled to visit the Juan Fernandez Archipelago. Then the week before my trip, the same flight I was supposed to take crashed as it attempted to land, due to high winds and difficult weather conditions. It was a terrible tragedy. Everyone onboard was killed. The island community was devastated and travel to the islands was suspended. It was a stark reminder of the danger of getting to these remote locations. I ended up going to the Galápagos instead. It’s, of course, much easier to get there, as there are so many tourists, but traveling between islands when you’re not with a tour is tough. I had to hitch rides on fishing and diving boats, and it wasn’t always clear how I’d get to the next spot.

For writing, the biggest challenge was digging into those unanswerable questions I mentioned earlier. The arguments for and against are both strong and so nuanced; trying to represent all perspectives, while giving the reader enough detail to draw their own conclusions was difficult.

You identified many challenges to eradicating invasive species — for instance, that it’s easier to target vertebrate species than insects or plants. Did you find any signs of hope?

Before there were techniques to eradicate rats from large, complex island ecosystems, many thought such eradications would be impossible. Even after initial successes, it was years before the eradication community started to accept it as real. And still, no one is sure if there’s a size limit past which an island would be rendered infeasible for rat eradication. I’d like to think that eradications of some invasive plants and insects are in a comparable state of development now.

In the meantime, there have been some great successes with controlling these types of invasions. Scientists I interviewed who were both for and against island restoration seemed enamored with one example in the Galápagos where the impact of an invasive insect called the cottony cushion scale is effectively being mitigated by the introduction of the Australian lady beetle. You’d think: Well, what’s to stop the shipped-in beetle from getting out of hand once it eliminates the cushion scale, but it turns out the beetle would rather starve to death than switch its prey. I’m not sure how humane that is, but such inventive techniques do offer hope. I’m optimistic that current methods will improve and become more humane, and that new techniques will be developed.

Island Conservation’s work raises a broader question about whether the killing of any animals can be justified. After reporting this story, how would you answer that question?

I think everyone would prefer that animals not be killed. The sad situation is that these endemic species are already being killed by invasive species against which they have no natural defenses and that we have exposed them to. If it were possible to remove rats, cats, and goats without killing them so that the native species could also live, this would be the best outcome by far. But in the context of rapid global extinction and biodiversity loss, it’s difficult to make an argument for doing nothing. These are tough ethical and moral problems, and a big part of why I felt the story should be told.

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T. DeLene Beeland

T. DeLene Beeland is a science and nature writer in Asheville, North Carolina. Her first book, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf will be released by the Univ. of N.C. Press this June.

In our “Natural Habitat” series, we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.)

Today we visit Robin Marantz Henig, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of several books, most recently TWENTYSOMETHING: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, written with her daughter Samantha Henig.

Science writer Jim Kling with Rodeo, one of his border collies, who is ignoring a sheep.

I’ve been a freelance writer for nearly two decades, specializing in science and medicine. Most of my living comes from editors who like my work and farm out stories to me. That’s healthy for my cash flow, but it comes with a drawback: I rarely get to choose what I write.

I doubt I’m alone in this, but I’ve never been very good at developing pitches. Press releases are generally uninspiring, and ideas from them aren’t likely to be original enough to impress an editor.

On those rare occasions when I do develop a compelling pitch, it seems to be born of serendipity — usually an off-hand comment during an interview.

But there are other sources, and you never know when a story might be staring you in the face. In January I happened on a pitch that earned a four-figure paycheck. It started with sheep.

My hobby is sheepherding with my two border collies. Once in awhile on a weekend, I travel to compete in sheepherding trials here in the Pacific Northwest. The rest of the time, I blow off steam on Tuesday afternoons by taking a break from my freelance routine and getting away from my computer and out into the country, where my dogs and I learn to round up sheep and move them around under the watchful eye of my trainer.

When I’m back at my computer, I spend time at the message boards of the United States Border Collie Club. Dog owners frequently post questions about housebreaking, health problems, behavioral issues, and training for sheepherding, agility, and other pursuits.

One day in January, a woman named Milena Mendez posted a message asking for advice on how to get her border collie to sniff out and fetch turtles. She explained that she was a biologist and wanted to use her dog in her field research.

I posted a bit of advice, got a laugh out of it, and then a few minutes later got to thinking: What was the story here?

So I contacted Mendez through the site’s message system. It turned out she was from Guatemala. A long-distance call to Guatemala City was out of the question for a spec interview, but she agreed to talk via Skype.

After a brief introduction, and pointing our respective tablets at our dogs so that she could meet mine and I could meet hers — we were both dog people, after all — I learned that she was studying an unusual species of turtle near a remote village on the border of Guatemala and Belize. One day last summer she was commenting to her assistant, a villager named Cush who had been a well-known turtle hunter, about how difficult the turtles were to catch because they spend all their time under water. Cush said he had trained his own dog to sniff out turtles and even their nests, and so she came up with her idea to use her dog, a Border collie puppy named Fenix.

That was enough for me, and I pitched the story to ScienceCareers.org as a profile of an early career scientist with an innovative approach to her work, and I got the assignment.

Reporting on the story, I learned that the turtle, Dermatemys mawii, known locally as the hickatee, is the last remaining species of an ancient family that dates to the Jurassic, which makes it a pretty remarkable animal. But then I learned of a genetic study that suggests that the turtle may have diverged into two different species, and both groups are present in the population that Mendez is studying. More research is needed to confirm, and Mendez plans to contribute to a genetic study that will address the question.

Reading a border collie message board turned into a pretty good environmental story. All of which goes to prove that my next great story idea could be anywhere — I just have to keep my eyes open and remember to ask myself: “What’s the story here?”

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Jim Kling lives and writes in the shadow of an active volcano. He is a professional writer and an amateur sheepherder, botanist, and father. He blogs at http://jimkling.wordpress.com.

Richard Todd

In 1973, Richard Todd was a young editor at The Atlantic Monthly. His boss, Atlantic editor-in-chief Bob Manning, had just handed him a manuscript with a note scrawled across the top, “Let’s face it, this fellow can’t write.” The story was about a mass murder in California and its author was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop named Tracy Kidder. Todd disregarded Manning’s comment and worked with Kidder on the piece until it was worthy of publication. Seven years later, Kidder would win the Pulitzer Prize for a book that Todd had edited. The two men have collaborated as editor and writer ever since. In their new book, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, the they share the lessons they’ve learned from one another over the past four decades.

TON managing editor Christie Aschwanden talked with Todd about Kidder, their friendship and the art of nonfiction.

Good Prose describes a decades-long relationship between you and Kidder. How did this relationship develop?

Soul of a New Machine was almost the first book I edited, and so we sort of began together, and we’ve grown together in the business. But the other part of it is that Tracy is unusually open to editing. He’s done what is difficult to do, which is to involve an editor in the process early in the game. It’s great if you can do it, but it takes thick skin.

You recount times when Kidder would just show up at your house for days on end. Your relationship seems to have an unusual closeness.

Yes. You’re right. Maybe too close for comfort, is that what you’re saying?

Does it feel that way?

Well, it’s an exaggeration to say every day, but there are long stretches when we do talk daily. And we don’t go for very long without being in touch. When Tracy’s working on a book, he checks in with me about little steps, or to say things out loud or to read a sentence or something. It’s part of the way we work, and it has been useful. It helps that we’re friends and so there’s other stuff to talk about. But, yeah, it is peculiar, I admit.

One piece of advice that you give to writers is to involve editors early on in the process. But how do you do that these days, when people don’t use the phone like they used to?

Yeah, I guess we’re describing a kind of ideal situation. Some editors just don’t want to see things until they’re further along. And you can’t force yourself on some of them. It just happens that sometimes editors and writers develop a particular association. So it’s a very idiosyncratic thing, I suppose.

What advice would you give to writers who want more guidance or collaboration from their editor?

Writers have to be careful. They don’t want to camp out on their editor’s door. They don’t want to start stalking. But, at the same time, I think writers may be inclined to err in the opposite direction. That is, they may hide a little bit from the editors or feel that they have to have something perfect before they deliver. And with some editors that’s true. I think it tends to be a little truer in magazine writing. With some magazines anyway, you really want to deliver something that you think is absolutely right, because there’s a pack of people there who are ready to rewrite if you don’t.

But if you have one editor that you work with, and that editor is sympathetic, then you can try some stuff out. You have to feel your way. But, especially with books, I think people do tend to make the mistake of hiding under their desk until the editor comes looking for them. I’ve made that mistake. With my previous book, I wish that I’d been in closer touch with the editor before I delivered.

The relationship between you and Kidder sounds like a true collaboration. Is the trick here to think of the editor as someone who’s willing to help instead of someone who’s going to come in and stomp around and squash your words?

Exactly. I like to think that I don’t present myself as a stomper. There are things a writer can do, like be willing to make him or herself a little more vulnerable and seek advice when there’s time to take it. I think sometimes editors do the opposite of stomping. They just throw up their hands. You’ve got a 375-page manuscript there. It’s delivered. And you sense that the writer doesn’t have the stamina to revise. And had you seen it at 75 pages, and seen something you thought was going in the wrong direction, you could correct course and work together.

One thing you say about Kidder is that he has an obsessive mind. When I’m in the middle of a project, I often feel a bit possessed, and it has occurred to me that obsession may be a necessary step in the process. Do you agree? Is an obsessive mind an asset or even a requirement for writers?

Well, I don’t know if it’s a requirement, but I do think it is an asset. Perhaps an unfortunate asset, but an asset. If you become single-minded, your book takes over your life. Books sometimes require that. It means that people around you, well, you possibly have a little bit more than they want to know about your subject. But that’s fine for the world at large, because your subject gets refined and you deliver a book.

Something you said in the book really struck me: “Perspective can be death to a writer in the midst of a book.”

Oh yes. At a certain point, your book is on the shelf, and later — years later — you can see that well, that was a nice contribution. I’m glad I did that. But at the time you’re writing it, you think, God, that’s all there is to it? You lose heart. I think writers have to overvalue it in order to value it at all. Let perspective come later. Just get it done. Get carried away.

So the writer jumps in. And one of the first decisions is where to start the story. You make an argument for quiet beginnings. Why is that? You seem averse to these beginnings that start in the middle of the action, which have definitely become a common structure in magazines.

Yeah, the wisdom is, don’t bury the lead, which often means start with something that’s exciting and will grab the reader. But here’s my rationale. Partly it’s that, as you say, it’s fashionable to do this, and I suppose what I’m doing is reacting to fashion negatively. But there is a kind of mechanical reason for this, and that is, if you look at pieces that start in the middle of things, they achieve immediate engagement. But they also force you to build a structure in which you spend a lot of time catching up, and going back and explaining this and that and the other thing. You start out in the interest of speeding up the action, but ultimately you end up slowing it down and confusing the reader, which is death. As a reader I don’t want to be confused. The writer’s first job is to help me understand, not to dazzle me. So that’s why I say don’t be afraid to bury the lead. The lead sometimes belongs buried.

We’ve all been told that the story’s drama comes from conflict, but you say it’s a mistake to assume that this conflict needs to come between characters. Sometimes the most important conflict happens within a character or within the narrator.

Yeah. I think that’s true. On the screen you can be diverted for 90 minutes by a good guy and a bad guy. If you’ve got that, that’s great. But usually you don’t. And life is more interesting, generally, because you don’t. Because people are complicated, and so on. You were one thing and then you were another. You understood something.

You call this a narrative of revelation.

Yes, I don’t know whether we coined this phrase, but we thought we coined it. The good stories, even if they do involve action, they involve learning something. They involve somebody coming to some recognition that then you share, and the reader shares. Or it may be in fact the narrator going into a situation, and having a sort of aha understanding of it. And that’s just far more interesting and more transferable to the rest of life. You’ve got a shootout. Well, okay. But if you have someone coming to an understanding about something they did wrong and why they did it — that’s something that travels into the reader’s life.

We said this partly as a kind of comfort to writers, because writers think, “Oh my god, my story’s fallen apart.” But often the story hasn’t fallen apart. You just haven’t figured out what the damn story is.

You write that most problems with writing are structural, even on the scale of the page.

I think that that’s true. What you choose to tell first affects everything else. You look at a paragraph, and it’s often just tangled. This relates to that business of not being afraid to bury the lead. If the lead is distorting the shape of things and making it hard to follow, then take it apart. People have a bias against chronology, thinking that telling something in the order that it happened is going to be boring. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes the order does need to be changed. But you want to change it in the service of helping the reader to understand, not exciting the reader. What’s the clear and engaging way to tell this? Some people may have a greater tolerance for confusion than I do as a reader, but I say a writer’s first obligation to me is to do what they can to work through this so that I get it.

You write in the book that stories lack propulsion if they lack sequence. What exactly do you mean by that?

You want to know where you are, you want to know where you are in time, and you want to know where you’re going. Now, the sequence may be a sequence of ideas and logic rather than a sequence of event and time. So that you can be plucking little fragments of information from here and there and arranging them, as long as you’re not lying about the order in which they happened, then that’s fine.

One of the decisions you make is this: Is this structure going to be dominated by idea and the logic of idea, or is it going to be dominated by event? And often it’s some mixture of those. But there’s a balance. If ideas need to come forward, then events maybe need to be scrambled. You can see this in microcosm in John McPhee. He’ll often slow to little fragments of dialogue that happened at one time or another. So he’ll make a general statement about somebody. And then he’ll just align some quotes, not saying that they happened sequentially, but they’re just little fragments of evidence that support a general remark about the person. Sequence of time is being violated but sequence of thought is being preserved.

What advice do you give to writers struggling to get through their shitty first drafts?

Go fast.

[Laughter.]

Tracy is a perfect case in point. When he started out, he would labor over these first drafts. And he talks about sitting up all night trying to write the first sentence, and having nothing but a wastebasket full of stuff. He has a great phrase for this, which is, write quickly to avoid remorse about having written badly.

One piece of advice I give for people doing first drafts is to recognize that structure is important, but don’t get prematurely bound up in it. I encourage people to write as well as they can for as long as they can. When the writing is turning sour, just stop and move on to another section. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to connect things. That work lies ahead of you and if it’s obvious that you can connect them, great. But don’t get hung up on it. You may emerge from the first draft with a collection of fragments, but the fragments then can be looked at, and you can get a little distance on them and you can see what order they’re supposed to go in.

It takes a superior mind, a mind certainly superior to mine, to be able to map something out completely in your head. A friend of mine once remarked that it’s almost the definition of a book that it’s a piece of writing too large to hold in your mind at one time. So you’ve got to take it in pieces.

You’ve been both a writer and an editor. Do you find one or the other more difficult, or are they both hard in different ways?

Oh no. It’s much harder to write. I think editors should always, always remember that. Not everyone can edit well, but I think no good editor would say that it’s harder to do that than it is to write. And it helps to write, though being a writer can get in your way as an editor when you think you know the right way to do it, when what you really know is your way of doing it. On the other hand, having suffered as a writer can be useful to you as an editor because you know  and are sympathetic to what the writer is going through. On balance it helps, with an important caveat– you can be too forceful about wishing your own sensibility on somebody else.

Are there any lessons you learned writing your previous book [The Thing Itself] that you couldn’t have learned as an editor?

I learned a lot about my own bad habits. That book suffered from procrastination. So that’s the main thing I learned. And I learned that the next thing I sit down to do, I will go about in a much more orderly way. I will follow my own advice, and get some help on it earlier in the game and talk some things out. I really didn’t have an intellectual companion on that book, and could have used one.

But will you really follow your own advice? You won’t just tell yourself, I’m not going to procrastinate this time?

That’s one of those pledges. I’ll never smoke another cigarette. I’ll be better at it this time.

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Christie Aschwanden is managing editor at TON.

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Image by Michael Bauman.

In 2005 Kendall Powell founded SciLance, an online community of 35 science writers, as a way to keep in touch with the colleagues she had met at conferences. The initial invitation to the group described it as “A network to discuss, ask advice, gripe, gossip, or otherwise virtually socialize about the business, ethics, logistics, struggles and joys of writing science journalism from home.”

That description still stands today, but the group has evolved beyond water-cooler talk to a true collective “workspace.” In 2009, when member Anne Sasso suggested that the group compile their collective wisdom about the profession  into a book, “We all half-laughed,” Powell says. The idea percolated for a while, and when the National Association of Science Writers announced their Idea Grant program in early 2011, the project finally went from pipe dream to reality.

Four years after that initial inspiration, The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age was published this week by Da Capo Press. Yesterday, we featured an excerpt from the book: Stephen Ornes’ chapter, “By The Numbers: Essential Statistics for Science Writers.”

Today, Powell leads a discussion about how 31 SciLancers team-wrote the book. (Learn more at the book’s website, pitchpublishprosper.com.)

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Members of Scilance participating in the discussion were:

Kendall Powell (moderator), contributor and founder of Scilance

Thomas Hayden, co-editor

Michelle Nijhuis, co-editor

Hillary Rosner, contributor

Stephen Ornes, contributor

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Kendall: What was it like writing a book with 31 contributors who are also colleagues and friends?

Michelle: Surprisingly easy. It helped that SciLance had already been in existence for several years before we started the book project — we’d built up a lot of trust in each other, and we all really valued the group and its long-term health. So the disagreements that did come up during the book-writing process were easy to handle. I think we all realized they were small compared to our loyalties to the group.

The book was a challenge to edit. Not only does it include 26 chapters by 25 different authors, but each chapter also includes perspectives from several different contributors. We started out with a solid outline and the chapter drafts were excellent, but inevitably the first draft of the manuscript had a lot of repetition and some missing pieces. So Tom and I did a bunch of weeding out and filling in.

The advantages of 31 contributors far outweighed the disadvantages, though — I love that the book includes voices from a wide spectrum of science writers. There are so many ways to make a living as a science writer, and the book gives readers a good taste of the possibilities. Also, the number of contributors has made it easier to market the book. For instance, while Tom and I took the lead on the editing, Sarah Webb headed up the website and Emily Gertz planned our social-media efforts. And Anne Sasso became our number cruncher and budget wrangler. After writing a book with so many collaborators, it’s hard to imagine doing it alone — now I have a lot of respect for authors who handle all their own marketing and publicity!

Kendall: Agreed, I don’t know how solo authors do it. I’ve appreciated how much we could depend on each other for every aspect of the project. Whether it was setting up a legal entity to handle money, or knowing that other people would post to Facebook, or doing “insta-edits” on some promotional copy needed ASAP and having three sets of eyes to make it shine.

Kendall: How did you come up with the structure for the book?

Tom: The idea for structuring the book in three thematic sections arose early. Originally we called it “Craft, Community and Commerce” back then, and I still think of those as the three pillars of a successful career in science writing. (There was a fourth potential pillar — “Complaints, Crises, and Conundrums” — but we soon realized those particular Cs cut across the other three!) [Kendall interjects: Wait, I thought the fourth C was Cussing?]

We knew that we wanted to write the book in much the same way that we built the community of SciLance — as a group of quite independent individuals, who each benefitted from the experience of the others, even when there were differences in approach. Initially, we thought we’d write much of the book by mining past SciLance threads. Ultimately, though, the great majority of the material was new. Most of the chapters still draw on the “SciLance brain,” though — authors asked new questions of the list, rather than relying on past conversations. I’m awfully glad we did — it makes for a much fresher, more intentional guide.

Kendall: How did you decide who was going to write each chapter?

Tom: It was carefully orchestrated chaos, with a focus that each contributor would write chapters he or she was truly excited to write. In September 2011, we posted a signup sheet with the proposed list of chapters and sidebars, and contributors added their names to chapters they were interested in writing. Some chose chapters they’d initially proposed, some chose topics close to their hearts, and some chose subjects they wanted to learn more about. Some chose the same chapters and a few unlovely chapters were not selected. Alison Fromme, one of our project managers, did a masterful job of matchmaking through gentle peer pressure and delicate diplomacy to find every chapter a willing author, and every willing author a chapter.

Then, the authors had a week to revise their chapter titles and descriptions. I think that was a crucial step — whether authors had proposed the chapter initially or not, we wanted to be sure that each of us took ownership over the material we would contribute, and shape and frame it as individual writers within the larger framework of the book.

Kendall: Why did you include chapters that covered “soft skills,” such as Hillary Rosner’s on handling rejection?

Tom: Actually, TON managing editor Christie Aschwanden, a SciLance member at the time and an early enthusiast for the project, played an important role in setting that tone. I recently found a 2009 note from Christie advocating that overall, the book should be “more of a ‘how to survive as a freelancer’ than a ‘how to write kick-ass queries and stories.’ All the stuff that writing books never address.”

Hillary: I’m not sure I’d call handling rejection a soft skill … it’s as hard as it gets!

Kendall: Hillary, was it hard baring your soul about how you handle rejection with the whole science writing community?

Hillary: Not at all. I’ve had a lot of rejection over the course of my career, and I’m more than happy to share it around. Seriously, though, I do think that learning to deal with rejection is an essential part of surviving as a writer. (Please remind me of that the next time I’m hiding in bed, wallowing in self-pity.) It totally sucks … but it’s gonna happen, and if you can’t pick yourself up and get back to work, you’re never going to earn a living. So writing the chapter was kind of cathartic, and it reminded me of just how important it is to learn to cope.

That said, I’d be much happier if everyone would just tell me how great I am and throw money at me every time I type a sentence.

Kendall: How did you keep the wheels moving on a project with so many team members, most of whom are freelancers with their own busy assignment calendars?

Michelle: Again I think the trust within SciLance helped us here. Everyone was really considerate of Tom and me as editors, and made time for drafts and revisions as we needed them. I think editing a book with 30-plus contributors who were strangers might have been a very different situation.

Kendall: It helped tremendously that we had a “book team” in place to handle different aspects. It was handy to have seven people who could divide and conquer when it came to the almost-daily decisions to be made or the inevitable hiccups of legal issues, contract negotiations, decisions about cover art, blurbs for the back cover, etc. At least one of us would have a cool head or a brilliant insight for discussions with our agent, editor, or publicist.

Kendall: Did you have to deploy the “deadline flogger” at any time?

Stephen: I may have gotten flogged, but there aren’t any scars.

Kendall: I think Tom and I were actually the very last people to turn in our copy. We both made the silly decision to add babies to our families during that year. Yep, I blame it on the kids.

Kendall: Was it hard editing (and being edited by) friends?

Tom: I was deeply impressed by the professionalism and good natured acceptance of feedback and editing of all the SciLancers I edited. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t challenging — I was at every moment aware not only of potential hurt feelings and wounded egos, but also of the stinging emails we sometimes send about particularly chowder-headed editing decisions perpetrated on our outside work. Fortunately, if emails with the subject line “RANT: Hayden has ruined my chapter again!” were sent, I was left off the distribution list.

Hillary: OMG, it totally was NOT me who sent that email.

Michelle: Ha! I’ll second Tom on this — editing is a personal process in a lot of ways, and as an editor you sometimes feel like you’re sitting on the priest’s side of the confessional, seeing different writers’ first drafts and their different responses to edits. So while there were times when I felt nervous about taking friends into that metaphorical confessional, everyone handled the situation professionally and with good humor — I was so grateful for that.

Stephen: I didn’t know Tom and Michelle very well before the book work started in earnest, so I didn’t know how ruthless the editing and revising process would be. It wasn’t ruthless, though for some reason they didn’t want a 50-page chapter on statistics. (Go figure.) Both turned out to be generous, smart, and savvy, which made the process so productive. The final products far surpassed my original drafts.

Kendall: Stephen, you are now editing pieces on the book’s blog, including the multimedia pieces. Does that give you newfound appreciation for your own editors?

Stephen: Lord, yes. I’ve been lucky to work with many other good editors, and I’m doing my best to emulate their styles, generosity, and approach to making suggestions. I’m striving to be a “writer’s editor.” I’ve edited a number of multimedia pieces — slideshows and videos — and it’s fun to get a peek into other writers’ lives. When I worked with Mark Schrope on his Writing Labs piece, I kept thinking, “Why don’t I have a hammock in my office?”

Kendall: Did any awkward situations arise? How did you get through them?

Tom: I had to kill my own wife’s sidebar giving the spousal view of freelancing. Purely for reasons of space – our manuscript was several scores of pages too long, and our editor at Da Capo asked us to cut back substantially on the number of boxes and sidebars. Fortunately, Erika was a total pro about it, and I came out of the situation with nothing worse than KP duty for the next three years.

Hillary: Erika obviously read my chapter. You’re lucky.

Kendall: What has been the most fun part of the project?

Stephen: I still can’t believe it happened. After I joined SciLance, I read the ongoing threads and was treated to myriad inside jokes about books and hot tubs and wrestling with PIOs. I didn’t think these people were serious about writing a book.…

Kendall: Opening up a box and pulling out a real, live book with my name on the contributor page, nestled among those of some of my closest friends. As a writer, it really doesn’t get much better than that, does it?

Michelle: Getting to share all the little steps of process with colleagues and good friends. As a solo author, your friends might congratulate you when you get your cover or when the book goes up on Amazon, but it’s been even more fun to be able to toast one another each time we’ve reached a milestone.

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Today at The Open Notebook, we’re delighted to present an exclusive excerpt from The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age, a valuable new guide written by members of the Scilance writing community. In this chapter, freelance science writer Stephen Ornes provides a primer for thinking about numbers.

Tomorrow, we’ll feature a roundtable discussion with five of the book’s 31 contributors. They’ll reveal how the book came about — and the joys and challenges of producing a book with nearly three dozen colleagues.

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By the Numbers: Essential Statistics for Science Writers

By Stephen Ornes

The practice of science almost always requires measurement, and measurement often means fitting precise tools to an imprecise, messy, and complex world. As a result, scientific research — and science ­writing – can involve an ongoing wrestling match with uncertainty: every measurement introduces the opportunity for statistical error, human error, and a misunderstanding of the data (often by the science writer). In this chapter I’ll offer some general guidelines for how to think about scientific uncertainty, and then some tips on how to assess how serious the first two issues are in a given study, and to avoid being the cause of the third.

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The Uncertainties of Uncertainty

During interviews, scientists often implore science writers to take note of caveats. But for a writer, that can mean using part of your precious word count to dwell on nuances that are meaningful (and comprehensible) only to experts in the field. Too many caveats can result in a highly accurate piece that no one reads.

So how much uncertainty do you include in your article? There’s no easy answer, but here are some variables to consider.

Story length. If you’re writing a 300-word story on new research, you have enough room to hit only the high points. You can nod to the inherent uncertainty of the results with a word or two – by saying, for instance, that a correlation appears “very likely.” If you’re writing a 3,000-word feature, you may find that describing the reasons for the uncertainty – in accessible, clear terms – adds a level of depth to your reportage.

Your audience. News articles written for the general public don’t need to include every caveat and condition posited by the researcher. And the general public doesn’t need a behind-the-scenes peek at every new paper. However, that doesn’t mean science journalists have to be cheerleaders of the research: always consult at least one outside source, especially someone who can address the limitations of the new findings.

The implications of the uncertainty. The level of acceptable uncertainty varies wildly among fields. A clinical trial might gain notice for results that, to a particle physicist, have a laughably high level of uncertainty. Could a large degree of uncertainty undermine the study’s findings? Or – as is often the case in astronomy – does uncertainty suggest an interesting new direction for research? Ask the researchers.

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Seeing the Story in the Stats

Can’t tell a confidence interval from a p-value? Don’t know the difference between absolute risk and relative risk? It’s time to do a little homework. Science writers often have to wade through papers packed with statistics, and the jargon is easy to misinterpret. Here are some tips to help make your story as accurate as possible, and a short glossary of common stats terms. (I’ll often use examples from biomedical research, but the concepts apply to everything from astronomy to zoology.)

Percent vs. percentage points. Let’s start off with an easy one. A percent, by definition, is the amount in each hundred something occurs. For example: 12 out of 50 U.S. states start with a vowel, which means
24 percent of U.S. states start with a vowel – and therefore 76 percent start with a consonant. Percentage points are totally different. Percentage points are the difference between two percentages. The difference between the percent of states that start with a consonant and those that start with a vowel is 76 − 24 = 52 percentage points. The difference between a 6 percent mortgage and a 4 percent mortgage is 2 percentage points, even though 6 is 50 percent more than 4.

Know that correlation does not imply causation. Large observational studies have reported an association between higher consumption of alcoholic beverages and increased risk of breast cancer. However, that doesn’t mean we can use those studies to report — as many outlets do — that “drinking alcohol increases your risk of cancer.” Because observational, or epidemiological, studies compare what has already happened to one group to what has happened to another in the general population, they can identify only correlations, not causes. So if the scientists use an observational study and report an “increased risk,” that doesn’t mean they found the cause of the increase — the drinkers could all be doing something else that contributes to cancer, for example. (Causality is remarkably difficult to establish, but there are other types of studies in which medical researchers have more control over the variables and can therefore come closer to identifying a cause.) It bears repeating: if the scientists use an observational study to report an “increased risk,” that doesn’t mean they found the cause of the increase.

Ask a statistician. If you’re not sure whether you’re accurately reporting the findings from a particular study, look at the author list. For medical studies, find the biostatistician. Call or e-mail. Ask. If you’re unsure whether the statistical measurements justify the conclusions of the paper, find a disinterested statistician who did not work on the study. Ask.

Pay attention to the tools being used. Did the study report relative risk, odds ratios, or hazard ratios? Or something else? Make sure you report which populations are being compared. Do researchers claim a “reduced risk” in press releases when the study reports only odds ratios? Find out why. (And see the glossary on p. 56 for definitions of those terms.)

Look at the confidence interval. Peer-reviewed studies that present a conclusion based on statistics almost always include the confidence interval, which is the numerical range that likely (usually with 95 percent probability) includes the true value. Large confidence intervals indicate high uncertainty, and may mean that the finding isn’t as strong as the headline you have in mind would imply.

For health studies, compare the increase or decrease in risk to the risk itself. A study that connects some genetic quirk to a 50 percent increased risk for some disease seems a lot less important if the likelihood of developing that disease is, say, 0.5 percent — in which case that genetic quirk is associated with an overall risk of 0.75 percent. See absolute risk below.

Find sources you trust. If you’re working on a story and come across a stats expert who can explain things really well, keep that person’s contact info handy. Next time you’re in a bind, that person may be able to help you out. (And remember, the next time you meet that source at a conference, the beer’s on you.)

Use appropriate language to describe the evidence. If you’re reporting on a study that tested a human medical treatment on mice, be sure to point out that the subjects were mice, not humans. Specify how many mice, and what the next level of testing will measure.

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A Science Writer’s Statistical Phrasebook

Statistical Significance

What it means: Statistical significance gives researchers a way to distinguish between events that happen at random and those that may happen for a reason. Results are usually said to be “statistically significant” if there is a less than 5 percent chance that the measured outcome would have occurred at random.

What to watch for: Statisticians have pointed out that the 5 percent cutoff is arbitrary, and some researchers go so far as to say that studies that rely on statistical significance may not themselves be reliable. Small sample sizes and large confidence intervals may indicate that the findings have weak support from the evidence. Watch for follow-up studies that verify or discredit the original.

P-value

What it means: The p-value tells you the likelihood that the observed test result happened by chance. A low p-value means the results were significant and unlikely to have occurred by chance. “Statistical significance” usually requires a p-value of less than 0.05, which means that there is at most a 5 percent chance that the outcome occurred at random.

What to watch for: p-values larger than 0.05 suggest that the correlation is weak.

Confidence Interval

What it means: The range of values that likely includes the reported value of the measurement, within the probability determined by the p-value.

What to watch for: Does it seem like a large range of possible values? Ask the researchers why it seems so big. Do the possible values of the measurement include zero? That may be a red flag.

Odds Ratio

What it means: This is a common tool used in studies that compare people with a particular condition — such as a particular disease, or on a particular drug — to people who do not have that condition. Odds ratios compare the likelihood of an event’s occurrence — such as death — in two groups in a study. Specifically, it compares the odds of the event in one group to the odds of the event in the other.

What to watch for: Be wary of reporting odds ratios as risk. If a study reports an odds ratio of 1.35, that doesn’t automatically mean they found an increased risk of 35 percent. Talk to the study authors or a statistician to get a good handle on what the number means — and how to report it.

Relative Risk

What it means: Another common tool used to compare risk, or probability, in two different groups.

What to watch for: Be careful not to report relative risk as absolute risk. That can lead to overstating the importance of a result (see below). For example, studies have found an association between aspirin and significantly reduced relative risk of cancer, but that corresponded to only a small drop in an average person’s risk.

Absolute Risk

What it means: In disease studies, this is the average lifetime risk of a person developing the disease.

What to watch for: In studies that compare risk between different groups, be sure to know how they report their results. Say the absolute risk of developing Disease X is 10 percent, and researchers find a 50 percent increase in relative risk associated with a rare genetic mutation compared to people without the mutation. Then the absolute risk of developing Disease X, for people with that mutation, is 10 × 1.5, or 15 percent.

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SciLance says . . .

• Use simple but scientifically appropriate language in your reporting. Make sure what you write accurately conveys the evidence from the scientific study.
• Get to know your stats. Become friends with confidence intervals, p-values, relative risk, and their friends. When in doubt, don’t fudge — ask a statistician.
• Determine the sources of uncertainty in the fields you cover. Do they arise from the tools themselves? What do the experts worry about? What do they criticize each other for?
• Understand the implications of the study you’re covering. What does it mean if it’s accurate? How will it affect people? What about if it’s false?
• Find sources you trust to give you perspective on new research. Pamper them.
• Think critically about the research you’re covering. Seek outside opinions on the findings to put them in perspective.

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Stephen Ornes writes about math, physics, space, and cancer research from an office shed in his backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. He’s written about tilting exoplanets for Discover, the mathematics of pizza slicing for New Scientist, and tumor banking for CR. His first book was a young adult biography of mathematician Sophie Germain, and he teaches a science communication class at Vanderbilt University.

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From the book The Science Writers’ Handbook, edited by Thomas Hayden and Michelle Nijhuis. Reprinted by arrangement with Da Capo Lifelong, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013.

Today we continue our series Single Best. We asked top journalists and editors to give us their single best piece of advice — given or taken, their single best idea, reporting trip or memorable experience. Here, Maryn McKenna shares a lesson she learned while reporting on a tsunami.

McKenna is a columnist for Scientific American, a blogger for Wired and the author of SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

Videography by Evan Howell and made possible with a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

In our “Natural Habitat” series, we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.)

Today we visit Jessa Gamble, an award-winning Canadian journalist. Gamble’s work has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, and Canadian Geographic. She’s given a TED talk about sleep cycles and circadian rhythms, the subject of her book, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How We Measure and Experience Time. She blogs at The Last Word On Nothing and splits her time between Oxford, England and Yellowknife, Canada.

Rachel Aviv

The criminal justice system has long relied on scientists — and especially psychologists — to make some of the most crucial assessments about defendants. Is this person fit to stand trial? Should the so-called insanity defense be applied? In many instances, the law lags far behind the science, with sometimes disastrous results. In “The Science of Sex Abuse,” Rachel Aviv details the troubling gap between the research on pedophiles and the draconian way these marginalized sex offenders are handled by prisons and courts. Specifically, Aviv explains the aftermath of a 2006 child-protection law that allows people convicted of sex crimes against children to be held indefinitely (via civil commitment) if it’s determined that they may have difficulty “refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released.” Her story focuses on John, an inmate who was originally arrested on child pornography charges. [The Science of Sex Abuse appeared in the January 14 issue of The New Yorker.]

Here, Aviv tells TON guest contributor Lauren Friedman the story behind her story:

This is a difficult topic to tackle. Where did the idea come from?

I had a former tennis coach who I’d heard had been arrested for using child porn, and it sparked a lot of questions. I started thinking about the blurriness between having fantasies about forbidden things and actually doing those things. I also wondered how the Internet facilitates those fantasies and how online communities might reinforce and intensify those desires.

How did this develop from a general idea about child porn into a story that focused on a particular person?

I wanted to be able to write about someone who could really deconstruct his own fantasies, who could talk about what it means to be inappropriately attracted to young people. I wrote one prisoner at the Butner Correctional Facility [in North Carolina], where eighty civilly committed men were being held, and within a few months, I had dozens of prisoners writing me. They had all been held for months or years past the expiration of their criminal sentences without a hearing. They felt as if they had fallen off the face of the Earth.

How did your relationship with John develop?

John called me one to two times a week for four months. He had read a lot himself about child porn, so we ended up talking about various academic books and papers on the subject, which became a common frame of reference. I think that helped us in our early conversations.

Was it hard to get John to open up about these more personal things?

These guys who are civilly committed have been interviewed by so many psychologists that they’re used to responding to humiliating questions. I don’t think John was particularly surprised by any of my questions. When I went to interview him in person, I got there at 8:30 in the morning and didn’t leave until three. We sat in a small cinderblock room together. He was crying a lot, but the conversation just went on and on. … I don’t like doing phone interviews at all, except maybe with academics who are providing background or contextual information. I’m asking sources such personal questions. … In a lot of ways, there is no good response, and the only response I can convey is in my face.

Did your sympathies change at all as you reported the story? Did you feel sympathy toward John?

I felt horrified by the Kafka-esque nature of his journey through the criminal justice system. The helplessness that he was experiencing — I empathized with that. I chose someone whose crimes weren’t so monstrous that the possibility of empathy wasn’t immediately foreclosed. Generally, whenever I write about someone, they spend so much time describing their own perspective and worldview that it’s hard to not start to see the world through their eyes, at least to some degree.

Did you ever feel that you were being told a story?

John was a mildly unreliable narrator. He clearly had changed a lot of details about his life from one psychiatric interview to another, which got him in trouble and led to his civil commitment. He would even lie in ways that clearly went against his own best interest — there’s no reason to say you’ve had sex with more people than you have when you’re being accused of being a sexual offender. But he was candid about his own tendency to exaggerate. And we were with each other for so long at the prison that I could circle back to certain details and his description would often feel less adorned the second or third time. In the article, I also tried to convey that John was somewhat unreliable as a narrator. I wanted readers to be able to make their own choices about what to believe.

What kinds of records did you use to put together the details of John’s crimes and convictions?

I had a couple thousand pages of prison records, court records, probation notes, and transcripts. A lot of the records were available through PACER, but confidential records — like psychological reports and progress notes — those I got from John’s lawyer. What was most interesting to me were the reports written by prison psychologists. It was a window into the way they work. Also, once I knew personal and biographical information about John from the reports, it became easier to ask him specific questions.

The story raised a lot of legal issues. Was getting at the science behind some of this illegal behavior important from the beginning?

It became clear pretty quickly that everyone who studied this issue was frustrated that the science has become so politically and emotionally charged. In these cases, science is being used to achieve a particular end in the legal system, so I wanted to put this work in context and include the opinions of people not involved in the legal process.

What was the timeline for this piece?

I started thinking about it in August 2011, and a few months later I proposed a story about a man named Todd Carta. Originally the article was going to be due in March 2012, but by March I’d decided that Todd Carta wasn’t the right subject for the piece. I didn’t really connect with him on the phone. If I can’t connect with him, it seems unrealistic to expect that readers would. I threw out everything I’d done and started again.

What were the major challenges you encountered while reporting?

The prison posed a huge challenge. They held a lot of letters and denied my requests at first to visit prisoners. At one point, my number was blocked by the prison because I offered to send someone stamps (so he could send me his memoir), which is against the prison rules. A public information officer called me and read the transcript of my conversation aloud. Knowing that these interactions were so closely monitored definitely made the conversations more strained.

You wrote about some of the child porn subculture online. Was that a hard thing to explore legally?

I mean, I really couldn’t witness it myself — I’d be breaking the law. I had read about a journalist at NPR who got in trouble while trying to research child porn for a story. So there really isn’t much [available] about the subculture except via descriptions of people who’ve already been arrested.

Did your feelings toward child porn laws evolve?

The laws around child porn and particularly sex offenses are inconsistent. The population is so despised that we seem to take their rights to due process less seriously. With civil commitment statutes, I think one problem is that the laws are often passed as a response to the most gruesome acts. These extreme, horrific cases end up shaping the legal landscape for a much broader, more heterogeneous group of criminals.

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Lauren Friedman

Lauren F. Friedman is a writer, editor, and multimedia journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, GOOD, OnEarth, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. She is currently a staff editor at Psychology Today and a member of Neuwrite. Follow her on Twitter @fedira.

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Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Click here to see previous installments.)

Today’s question: How many stories are you working on at one time, and how do you manage your assignments so that you’re not over or under worked?

Journalist and editor Kat McGowan:

In the last six weeks, I’ve been working on eight projects for seven editors at four publications, which is about the limits of what I can keep track of. Trafficking multiple assignments simultaneously is an invisible time suck, and the time that is consumed by task-switching rises exponentially with more stories or projects to track, especially if they are short. The best way to avoid this is to try to get predictable recurrent projects (column, editing gig) that serve as the anchor points of your schedule, and build everything else around that. Another tactic that helps is taking fewer longer assignments, or bundling together short ones with the same editor and publication).

Beyond that, I’ve got no secrets. I am always either underworked or overworked. I’ve been freelancing on and off for more than 15 years, and I’ve given up trying to control the flow. It’s more being able to turn on your afterburners when you need to, and know that sometimes, you’ll have to work some extremely long days and/or work very quickly.  Just accept that it’s going to be patchy — try not to lose composure when everything happens simultaneously, and get everything else in life done when there is downtime, in preparation for the next wave of assignments and edits. Embrace the uncertainty! It keeps life interesting.

That said, full and early communication with editors helps avoid or mitigate some crises. I have also been an editor for long stretches of my career, which has made me very familiar with the doom and panic that consumes editorial offices when deadlines approach. If I know I’m going to be swamped or unavailable, I try to anticipate the problem and let the editor know as early as possible (i.e., before they’ve asked for a quick turnaround on an edit).

Independent journalist Rebecca Boyle:

Well, I was hoping to write this response before I left for Chile, but I ran out of time…which I guess is the beginning of my answer to this question. I am usually working on way too many things at once, and I am not great at managing assignments so I’m not overworked. I (almost always) make my deadlines, and I am getting better at turning down work if I know I don’t have time for it, but I think I do take on too many things at once. I’ve never had a problem with deadlines until probably the last six months, when the amount of work on my plate has reached its apex.

When I do extend a deadline, it’s almost always for a feature story that I am putting off to fulfill my blogging responsibilities (with the same editors), and my editors know I will get it done later. So far, I haven’t had to stop working on an assignment mid-stream or anything like that. What’s more, in the past few months I have had a nasty case of writers’ block for the first time in my career, so things are taking a bit longer than normal.

At any given time on a given day, I am usually working on at least a couple features in various stages of reporting/writing, and at least two to four blog posts. Today, for example, I just got back from a trip to the Atacama Desert for the new ALMA radio telescope inauguration — so I’m working on at least four separate short stories and features related to that. Then here is the rest of my list:

• 3 features for PopSci.com
• Other magazine piece
• Piece for a children’s magazine
• Researching blog piece for another magazine
• Fact-checking in progress for a European magazine
• Rewrites of technical info for a corporate client
• Plus 3x/week blogging duty for PopSci.com
• Plus, theoretically, writing pitches for new publications

This stuff is all on my list for the next week. So I think I clearly take on too much, which is a function of having been the sole breadwinner in my household for the past three years. Turning down work is literally turning down money, and for a long time I just didn’t feel like I could do that, especially after the scary experience of being laid off from a newsroom job. But now that I am a little more established as a freelancer, I feel more empowered to say no to assignments that either don’t pay well enough, or that I’m just not interested in doing. Still, if any TON readers have some advice about how to manage workflow better, I’m all ears!

Freelance science and health journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer:

I wish I could share the Moyer Formula for Managing a Perfect Workflow, but…there isn’t one. I just use my intuition and experience. At any given moment I might be working on between three and 10 stories (it dropped to zero once last year and I almost had a heart attack!), and the number changes based on the types of assignments I have and when they are due. So let’s say an editor emails me asking if I’ll take on a story. First I evaluate the story. Is it a 200-word news piece or a 2,000-word feature? If it’s a feature, is it a bullet-point service feature or a narrative feature (more work and might involve travel)? Is it a topic I know well, or something about which I know nothing? And of course, last but certainly not least, does the assignment interest me, and does it pay enough or provide enough exposure to be worthwhile?

Once I’ve figured all that out in my head (and assuming I have answered “yes” to the last question), I think about what else is on my schedule and how the reporting for this new piece might fit in. I’ll say, OK, I’ve got that 1,200-word story due next Monday, but I’ve pretty much finished reporting it; but I do have a ton of interviews and reading left to do for that feature due in mid-March. And then there’s the other piece I might need to travel for next week, which will eat up a whole three days. And there’s that feature edit that’s probably going to come back to me next week, which I might have to re-work quickly. Does that leave enough time for me to report and write this new piece in time? I basically try to envision my work days if I accept the assignment versus if I don’t. As a rule, like to stay quite busy—on the edge of over-busy—but I don’t want to feel totally overwhelmed and be forced to work evenings and weekends. It’s a tough balance, and I don’t always achieve it. I have slow weeks that irk me (though these are usually when I get to pitch new story ideas, so they’re important too) and super busy weeks that really stress me out.

As for managing my assignments once I have them, again, I don’t have a formula or even a smart spreadsheet. (Regarding blogging, I don’t do much of that anymore, but I do have a bi-weekly column for Slate that is always on my mind.) But I always try to begin reporting intimidating pieces (like features) immediately, especially if they’re topics I don’t know well. I try to find the key players in the field, reach out to them to set up interviews and ask for leads, and start reading studies or reports or whatever I can find, really. I might end up taking breaks — even lengthy ones — from the reporting, a few days or weeks in to tackle other stuff, but I always do some initial reporting right away, to give me a feel for the assignment and how much work it’s going to require. Sometimes, I find, the reporting goes in directions that I never could have anticipated — I might catch wind of some crazy theory or cover-up that I need to investigate — and it’s far, far better to stumble upon these surprises two weeks before a deadline than two days before it. Also, reporting right away means that if something goes wrong or I realize I need more time, I can notify the editor well before the deadline. They usually appreciate that.

For features in particular, I also find that I need to re-group multiple times during my reporting to make sure I’m doing what I should be doing. This is especially important for me because I write for very different audiences, and I always need to remind myself what angle(s) will be most appropriate (and this is not always the angle I myself find the most interesting). Right now, for instance, I’m working on an investigative feature for Cosmopolitan (my first!), and I have thought a lot about structure and direction because I want to make sure I’m addressing the aspects of the issue (which is huge) that young women will find most compelling and important. About halfway through my reporting (about a month before my deadline), I sat down and thought about possible structures so that I could identify holes in my reporting; sure enough, I realized that there was a section I wanted to include that I had barely reported. Again, I don’t do this methodically; a lot of the re-grouping and structuring happens in my head when I’m taking my dog for a walk or taking a shower, but the important thing is that it happens.

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Image by shutterstock.com

Paige Williams

A dinosaur known as Tarbosaurus bataar once roamed what is now Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. About seventy million years later, its fossilized bones turned up at an auction in New York City, placing it at the center of a contentious battle between governments, paleontologists and professional bone hunters.

From the moment Paige Wiliams learned about the black-market fossil trade, she knew she’d found a great tale. After several years of stalking the story with a combination of obsession and patience, she turned her narrative to the case of T. bataar and  Florida fossil trader Eric Prokopi.

[Bones of Contention appeared in the January 28, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.]

Here, Williams tells TON managing editor Christie Aschwanden the story behind the story:

How did this story come about?

Separating Topic from Story, the topic came up about three years ago when I noticed an inside-the-newspaper blurb about a Montana dinosaur thief.

I thought: What? People steal dinosaurs? People steal a whole world of fossils, as it turns out. I started looking into it as a possible book project and found the history of black-market fossils compelling in a way that interested me more than anything had interested me in a while. It was multidimensional, with such colorful characters; the thread ran through American history, the birth of formalized science in this country, the evolving concept of property rights, the byzantine U.S. Bureau of Land Management (which is really interesting, if you like that sort of thing), the industry of creationism, and two of my favorite subjects to read and write about: nature and crime.

I came to the idea from a crime angle but then got completely sucked in by the science, and by the ongoing tension between commercial fossil hunters and paleontologists. In the early stages I did a lot of wide-net reporting and speculative spending (not recommended) without knowing where any of it was going. And for three years none of it went anywhere, a special sort of torture. I spent a good chunk of that time trying to get beyond Topic and into Story to my own satisfaction, because if I’m going to spend a couple or several years on a book I want critical mass and a story that excites me.

The fieldwork was incredibly fun. A photographer/videographer friend and I went on T. rex digs in Wyoming and South Dakota, and to Badlands National Park, one of the biggest poaching hotspots in this country. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with all the footage and photos and reporting from that summer. The other wide-net reporting: I went to fossil-preservation conferences on spec, the Tucson fossil show on spec; talked to a million paleocrats; stockpiled lawsuits, some of which had spent a decade or more in court. I set up enough Google alerts to take down the Internet.

My apartment became 80 percent paleontology texts. I basically just saved string and kept looking for the true narrative. But I couldn’t find a way into the idea that seemed solid enough for a cogent proposal, much less a commitment. By last May, I had decided to drop it and look for another book idea when the Mongolia case broke. I remember reading about it online, in bed, and just slamming the laptop shut and going, “No.” You’d think I’d have had the opposite reaction but I didn’t. I was wrapping up a particularly stressful teaching year and I was tired, hoarse, discouraged, grumpy, and fossils had been nothing but a tease. I didn’t trust the story not to turn on me.

So I waited. I went away for two weeks at the end of the spring semester with my dog, to get some fresh air and listen to coyotes at night and read good books and eat good food and think about what I wanted to do with my life. In the meantime the Mongolia case kept developing; every few days I’d open the laptop and peek at it. It became irresistible and eventually I knew I wanted to do it, because it had so much of what I had been looking for: a narrative that dropped down into much larger international issues about who owns, or should own, these amazing prehistoric remains, which are so important to understanding the history and perhaps the future of the planet.

So you finally had your story. Then what?

By the time I pitched it, the outline was clear: the characters, the potential shape of the story, etc. Enough had happened that I felt the story gaining traction as a viable thing, with potential for both development and resolution. And that was before the criminal charges came into play. The criminal charges made things more challenging but also more interesting — more was at stake. So while the early reporting consisted of poking around in that particular slice of the paleontological world and trying to figure out who the reliable sources were, who the real players were, the second stage consisted of more focused reporting.

This story references a lot of court documents and other official paperwork. How did you go about collecting all these documents?

Slowly then all at once, to cheaply quote Hemingway. (Or was it Fitzgerald? I never can remember.) I started with the case file, what little existed at that point, and by reordering within the context of this story whatever materials I had already gathered. From there, expansion: exclusive source materials to fossil-show maps to public records. Nothing was too small. County building permits, for instance, offered details like the one about the size and construction schedule of Eric Prokopi’s backyard workshop. One question usually leads to another and with any luck the answers — or at least leads to the answers — exist on paper. Consequently, I live in a tinderbox. I keep thinking I should find a system to digitize everything but the feel of real paper and the possibility of marginalia are, to me, two of the great pleasures of working.

How did you keep track of it all without feeling overwhelmed?

Oh I felt overwhelmed. I used to fight and resent that feeling but I don’t anymore, because it’s inevitable. I’ve made an uneasy peace with the knowledge that I’ll wake up plenty of days, look at the pile of reporting, and just climb back under the covers. (Sometimes it’s easier to think under there.) Because I’m slightly or maybe profoundly obsessive I collect whatever I can find, bringing back not only the shiny bits, like a crow, but also the mundane stuff that may eventually prove important. It’s sort of Depression-era reporting: hoard it, because you might need it. I’d rather gather too much than not enough and then put it in an order that makes sense to me.

At the risk of getting too precious about Process: I’ve always loved asking other writers how they work — especially how they manage vast amounts of incoming information — because I thought someone might have the magic answer. But the truth is, there’s probably no possibility of consensus. Every reporter is different, every story is different. The story I’m working on now is very different from the dinosaur story, so the process can’t help but be different. I tried uniformly applying a variety of  “systems” — note cards, wall-sized outlines, all kinds of things. Color-coding and cross-referencing may or may not have been involved. I may or may not own a triple hole-punch. Ultimately, though, I felt I was spending more time playing reporter/writer than being reporter/writer — the systems search, I realized, was a form of procrastination. Here’s what I do now, and it’s very basic: Bring the scraps back to the nest, arrange them chronologically, develop a timeline that shows everything more clearly, and then build out from there, hewing to that backbone yet following each thread to its known end. That’s just an organizing principle, not the same as story structure.

You did a lot of travel for this story — to Denver and Florida and New York. Did you also go to Mongolia?

No. Early on, we talked about my going but decided we didn’t know enough to warrant a trip. At one point I tried getting on with a team of scientists heading into the Gobi but (a) they have a strict no-journalists policy, possibly because, as one paleontologist told me, they “go feral” out there (which made me want to go; feral scientists? sign me up); and (b) the trip would not have served the strict narrative mission of the story. It would’ve been a great adventure, no doubt, but it was important to weigh the potential reporting yield against the time and money involved. Is it worth it to travel to the other side of the world just for a few lines of description about the Nemegt Basin or a hotel in Ulaanbaatar? My editor, a brilliant dude, thought no, and I agreed. My time would be better spent here, chasing the domestic core of the story. It was totally the right call. I’d have had to travel within a particularly narrow window of time, and at that point I’d have gone blindly and inefficiently into the field without getting a sense of what I needed narratively.

This story runs eleven pages in the New Yorker. How do you go about structuring something this long and complex?

The structure announced itself with the auction. It seemed like a no-brainer of an opening. The rest unfolded from there. The section on Mongolia and the history of fossil preservation in the U.S. and the contradictory laws, some of that stuff was easy to go ahead and write, because I already knew it and had most of it in my notes. It wasn’t possible for every section to be truly modular — every section couldn’t simply go anywhere — but I played around with placements. The big structural note from my editor was to move the first Prokopi family section higher, which was dead on. In terms of the writing, as scenes became available I wrote them. It didn’t mean I ended up using all of them, but I went ahead and wrote them before the ink in my notebook dried.

The story has a lot of characters, and yet I never felt lost reading it. I suspect that’s because it’s so neatly divided into chapter-like sections. As you were writing, did you think of these sections in terms of their characters?

Oh good, I’m glad to hear that, thank you. It’s one of the things we talk about in the narrative journalism class that I teach at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard: Who is this story really about? Who needs to be in this story? Does the character actually advance the action or not? And if not, can that still be okay? You could argue that the T. bataar buyer, the New York real estate fellow, didn’t need to be in the piece at all, but the details were unexpected and interesting; they added something — texture, maybe — and, more to the point, their absence might’ve left a hole in the story. Who spends a million dollars on a dinosaur skeleton? Why? That the buyer had attachments to important environmental and nature organizations made his role all the more intriguing, I thought. In some ways the characters influenced the structure (the buyer belonged only deep in the piece, for instance) but straight chronology influenced it even more.

You have some wonderful characters in this piece. One of my favorite lines in the story is a quote by Kirk Johnson. “The day Sue got auctioned is the day fossils became money.”

It helps that Kirk Johnson is brilliant and hyperarticulate and quotable. He’s one of those rare scientists who is bilingual in academia and Everyman-ness — at home in both worlds to the extent that wherever he goes his enthusiasm for the field sort of ignites everyone around him. He’s the best ambassador for paleontology that I’ve met. When we went to the big fossil show in Denver he was still, at that point, the head of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and five weeks away from starting his new job at the Smithsonian. The commercial guys teased him about giving up Colorado for Washington, D.C. — to them it was like trading Eden for hell — but you could tell they respect and like him, and that he takes the time to listen. Johnson is a diplomat in the best sense of the word.

There was another scene that really struck me. It’s at the end, when the main character’s wife is feeling devastated by what’s happening to them and she tells her husband that their life is “pretty much over.” And then she asks rhetorically, “And for what? For bones? No one’s been murdered. We restored a dinosaur.”

That stood out to me too, when it was happening. At that point we had all been talking about what was next for them now that Eric Prokopi faced federal smuggling charges and was pleading guilty. The Prokopis were sitting on one side of their champagne-barrel table and I on the other, and they had been directing all their comments at me. At this point in the conversation, though, they started talking to each other, which is the best possible scenario for a narrative journalist if what you’re witnessing is an authentically human moment, which this was. Arriving at that moment goes to the heart of what narrative is often about: ears, eyes and patience.

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Christie Aschwanden is managing editor of The Open Notebook.

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Welcome back for another installment of Ask TON. (Click here to see previous installments.)

Today’s question: Why blog? It takes a lot of time and energy that you might otherwise spend on higher paid work. What do you get out of blogging?

Jennifer Frazer, author of the blog The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American:

I blog because the world is overflowing with creatures like myxobacteria, jelly lichens, liverworts, and bdelloid rotifers. They’re weird, fascinating, and oddly enough, usually abundant. Most people — biologists included — have never heard of them, or if they have, know little about them.

I had learned a lot about this stuff in college botany, mycology, and microbiology, and much of it was both amazing and obscure. I felt like I was sitting on some of the most wonderful untold stories in the world. I had to share them. I think that feeling of compulsion about something is essential to good blogging. It makes it easier, in any case, to keep pumping out posts.

At first, I thought I would go about sharing what I knew by writing a book. But that goal seemed so far off and difficult. I was working a full-time job to pay the bills. When would I have time to write a book proposal?

Then, in 2008, when I was visiting my old science writing grad program, I mentioned my book aspirations. Director Tom Levenson asked me if I’d considered starting a blog. I had reservations about finding images, and showing people good pictures and videos of what I wanted to write about was so central to my purpose. (Creative Commons licenses turned out to be a godsend.) Also, would I just be stealing material from my book?

But once I thought about it, it made a lot of sense. Unlike writing a book, blogging was a way for me to start working toward my goal TODAY, rather than just talking about it and never actually beginning.

Since then, I’ve discovered many other reasons to blog.

My blog is my own little kingdom. I write whatever I want, whenever I want. This allows me to cover topics that editors might never go for, and in ways they might veto. If I want to display a huge image that takes up the entire width of the screen, I can do that. If I want to insert a clip from Dune to make a point about roundworms (which I did recently), I can do that too. But having no editor is a double-edged sword. You must also do all the work of editing your own posts. In my opinion, work that has had two different pairs of eyes on it will always be superior to work that’s only seen one.

Blogging is a way of exposing your writing to the world — and to the eyes of peers and potential employers and fans — in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. In other words, it’s free (well, low cost) marketing. I was shocked at how many famous science writers were familiar with my blog and my writing at Science Online 2012, even though they’d never met me. I was also shocked a few days ago when a grad student whose work I covered in a recent blog post got in touch with me to let me know not only how she appreciated my post, but that she’d already been following my blog for some time.

In the case of editors, it can lead to you being offered work or getting a much warmer reception when you pitch something. They already know what your unedited writing looks like and whether they like it or not. One need not look far to find science writers who’s parlayed blogs into successful science writing careers. Ed Yong and Brian Switek are oft-cited examples.

In the case of fans, you can start building a following of loyal readers who know and like your work and will be looking forward to it at other places too, like books or magazines.

Blogging is an especially good format if you have a distinctive voice or like to use humor. These qualities tend to be muted in conventional news or feature articles. I am bursting with enthusiasm for my subjects, and on my blog, I can convey that in my own voice. If I want (attempt) to be funny or playful, I can. Some amount of voice and opinion is inherent to most blogging, and it’s a great way to spotlight those strengths.

Finally, blogging is great practice. Being great at anything requires a lot of it. This is an idea Malcolm Gladwell espoused in his “10,000 hour rule” in Outliers, in which he posits the key to success in any field is simply totting up the hours. He claims the Beatles, for instance, racked up more than 10,000 hours in seedy nightclubs in Germany before hitting it big in Britain. Although I believe some talent and some luck are also significant factors, there’s a lot to be said for an industrial-strength dose of practice. When you blog regularly, you will get better at writing, and you will produce a few gems. Those gems may earn you accolades, publication, readers, or jobs.

Recently I reread Elise Hancock’s opus on science writing, Ideas into Words (recommended!), where she asserts that what made Bach great was that he churned out music week after week as a “working stiff” for the Catholic church. A lot of it is mediocre and is forgotten. Some of it is great and will be remembered for the ages. “Today,” she writes, “we hear only his works of genius, of which we have so many because he wrote a little something every week.” Blogging can be like that working stiff church job. It increases both your capacity for — and odds of — creating great work.

Virginia Hughes, author of the blog Only Human at National Geographic’s Phenomena:

I started my first blog when I was in graduate school for science writing. So I’ve never known what it’s like to be a science writer and not blog. Still, I guess I’ve stuck with it for two big reasons: exposure and freedom.

Most of my non-blog writing is for science publications. That means that people who aren’t science-lovers are unlikely to ever read my stuff. Blog posts, in contrast, tend to get more diverse audiences. A few examples come to mind. A little more than a year ago, I got an email from a college friend. He had just read one of my posts from The Last Word on Nothing because it had been linked from Daily Dish, a hugely popular political blog run by Andrew Sullivan. My friend’s email said: “So I am reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog just now, which is really the only blog I read, and I come across this wonderful shout out. Congrats.” That made my week! Last November, a post I wrote about sleep, titled Re-Awakenings, was part of the reason I was asked to join National Geographic Magazine’s new blog network, Phenomena. The first post on my new blog there got picked up by the uber-aggregator reddit and has had more than 108,000 page views. Don’t get me wrong — there are many, many times when I put a ton of effort into a post and it gets little attention. But overall I think the exposure of blogging pays off more often than not.

Then there’s the amazing freedom of writing any story that you think is interesting. Blogs don’t have editorial gatekeepers saying your story isn’t fresh enough, punchy enough, weighty enough, blah blah blah. You get to follow your gut. That Re-Awakenings story, for example, was about a woman with a strange sleeping disorder and was helped by a drug with a long and tainted history. I knew from my reporting that it was a really compelling story, and so I initially tried to sell it to a big newspaper. The pitch never went anywhere, and looking back, I understand why. I couldn’t convey all of the cool parts of the story in the 300-word pitch. Frustrated, I just wrote it anyway, all 2,500 words of it, and threw it up on the blog. And it worked out.

(There’s another kind of freedom that comes with blogging that I’m growing to hate: the freedom to publish without an editor. I know that my posts would be better if an editor was looking them over before they went live. And I’m not just talking about copy-editing. In an ideal world, I would get to choose my stories and write them, and then an editor angel would swoop in at the end and make gentle, non-binding suggestions about how to improve structure, kill my darlings, and the like. Never going to happen, I know, but a girl can dream…)

DeLene Beeland, author of the independent blog Wild Muse:

Why blog? Because it’s fun. Because you have something to say. Because you want to be heard. But mostly because you’re definitely not doing it for money. In truth, there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are stars in the sky. I can only answer this question from my own personal experience, offering my own reasons and observations.

I know it’s anathema to most writers to give their words away for free, but not all of the reasons to blog equate to direct financial gain. For me, blogging is an exception. Some people blog because they want an outlet for their thoughts, a little sandbox to play in where they don’t have to worry about an editor or word counts; maybe they write for personal enjoyment or satisfaction — or maybe they do it for mental sanity. Still other people post on blogs for the community and networking that blogging can spark (think: ScienceOnline). I also know of writers, like Brian Switek and Meera Sethi, who have treated their blogs like writing labs, using it to experiment and get feedback as they go. Others, like Ivan Oransky, run blogs that provide a valuable service to our field.

I’ve noticed two very general approaches science writer/bloggers tend to take: 1.) blogging strategically, by posting regularly and using the blog specifically to promote their “brand” or their work or to build an audience as a writer/blogger; and 2.) blogging opportunistically, posting less regularly and using it to explore ideas of interest as it strikes their fancy. Both approaches are equally legitimate; personally I think you just have to decide for yourself what your goals are and how you’re going to use blogging to achieve them.

For me, the key to being happy blogging has been to realize that my blog doesn’t own me. If I need to set it aside for a few weeks or months to work on other projects, then I do. This is one reason I haven’t joined a blogging network, although I’ve been asked a few times. That’s probably the exact opposite of what a writing or business coach would advise you to do (because they’d want you to be building your writing empire by cultivating an audience). But by allowing myself to unplug from it when I need to, it makes the experience much more enjoyable on a personal level. And sometimes nice things happen when you give your posts away for free. For example, I’ve had three of my posts selected for publication in The Open Lab anthology series (2009, 2010 and 2012). Another perk: now that I’ve mostly been posting book reviews, I’ve received a half dozen or so books for free from authors and publishers.

I used to think of blogging as a platform for getting your name and words out there, but now I tend to think of it more like a cocktail party or a neighborhood corner bar: a place to stop in and chat with friends and colleagues, meet new people who think and do interesting things, exchange conversation and cultivate new ideas.

Steve Silberman, author of the blog NeuroTribes at the at the Public Library of Science:

Why I Blog

1. I blog because my interests are too omnivorous, quirky, and wide-ranging to be accommodated by any “beat.”

2. I blog because writers have to be their own brand these days. No masthead or corporation can provide job security anymore. Interested readers are my job security.

3. I blog so I can stay in the mix while working on longer-incubating projects.

4. I blog to be part of the larger conversation. With the advent of social media, the conversation never ceases.

5. I blog because I haven’t met the editor yet who says things like, “Steve, with your long track record, we trust you. If you’re really passionate about something, we know it will be great!”

6. I blog because sometimes I’m foolish enough to want the luxury of being my own worst critic.

7. I blog because Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were my literary heroes when I was young, and they launched a world-wide progressive cultural movement called the Beat Generation by printing their inspired poems and stories in “little magazines.” We can only imagine what they would have done with a low-cost global multimedia platform that enables the audience to find YOU.

8. I blog because there’s a lot of bullshit out there, much of it masquerading as conventional wisdom.

9. I blog to talk directly to my readers, one-on-one, without commercial interests shaping the message.

10. I blog because I’m lonely in my little room, and you’re lonely too, but if you give me a few minutes of your time, I may be able to briefly reawaken in us a shared sense of wonder.

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Image: Shutterstock.com

In our “Natural Habitat” series, we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.)

Today we drop in on the Brighton, U.K. office of freelance science journalist Priya Shetty. Shetty covers science, society and policy in the developing world for The Lancet, consults for The World Health Organization, and writes a design blog.

Today we continue our new series, Single Best. We asked top journalists and editors to give us their single best piece of advice — given or taken, their single best idea, reporting trip or memorable experience. Here, Laura Helmuth shares a bit of wisdom she learned from Molly Ivins.

Helmuth is the science and health editor at Slate and a member of the National Association of Science Writers executive board, and is also a member of the TON advisory board.
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Laura Helmuth’s Single Best from The Open Notebook on Vimeo.

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Videography by Evan Howell and made possible with a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

George Johnson

Some people fret over the chances that lightning might strike the same place twice. After three summers trailing lightning-chaser Tim Samaras on a unique photographic quest, science writer George Johnson would perhaps have been content with it happening just once. On assignment for National Geographic, Johnson patiently waited and watched as Samaras tried to capture a long-sought image. It was not to be, and that posed a conundrum: How to write about an unfinished quest and still leave your reader — and editor — satisfied? [Chasing Lightning appeared in National Geographic in August 2012.]

Here, Johnson tells TON co-executive editor Siri Carpenter the story behind the story:

How did you come to this story?

It was the summer of 2009, and National Geographic asked if I was interested in doing this story about Tim Samaras and his hunt to get this shot of a lightning bolt the moment the ground leader and the dart leader connect. This moment had never been recorded. His Holy Grail was to get this shot with this incredibly amazing Rube Goldberg-ish kind of camera — the Kahuna. They had already started with a different writer, and for some reason that didn’t work out. I said, “Sure.”

How important was it that you be there when and if he got the shot?

The original idea is that I would go out with him for a few days [on a few occasions ] — a week or two total — while he was chasing lightning storms across northeastern New Mexico and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and into Arizona and Colorado. I would follow him around; watch what he was doing; write about that, and, of course, if I was really lucky, he would get the shot that summer. If I was really, really, really lucky, I would be there when he got the shot, in which case I suspect [the story] would have been on the cover. The first summer we did this, he didn’t get the shot. My editor said, “We realized this was a long shot, both that he will succeed, and an even longer shot that you’ll be there when he does. But in any case it makes a great story, and the story is the quest.” So I wrote up the story of the quest and gave it to them in the fall of 2009.

After he had failed to get the shot.

Yeah. They liked the story. They paid me for it, which is nice. I found National Geographic to be a great place to work for, just very considerate of the writers. It was accepted, but they decided to give this guy another summer to go out and get the shot. They agreed that they would pay me extra for the additional field work.

Labor Day weekend was getting right toward the end of thunderstorm season, and he hadn’t been out yet because of technical glitches. Then there was a problem in the software guiding the camera, and he just never got it ready in time to get out [in 2010].

Then the question was, do we run this story and update it appropriately? He still hasn’t gotten the shot, but now the material is a year old. Why don’t we give him a third chance?

Originally the story was going to start with a long section of Samaras chasing lightning in the wild, and then it was going to be a more general story about the science of lightning. The thought, after that second summer, was that Samaras was going to drag the Kahuna all the way up to the top of the mountain in southern New Mexico, to the lightning observatory, and I would watch while they shot rockets into thunderstorm clouds. The rockets would be tethered to these long wires that draw down lightning from the heavens. Samaras would get a picture of tethered lightning, and this would be a great thing. It would be the second-best thing to getting it in the wild. The story would come full circle in the end in a very satisfying way.

Even if Samaras didn’t learn as much about lightning as he would have with natural lightning, the journey would be fulfilling to readers.

Right. You would have had this nice sense of it looping back to the quest introduced in the first section of the story: Samaras gets the shot. And it would have had a good shot of being on the cover of National Geographic.

So I went up there, and as I described in that scene, I’m huddled in the trailer in this ferocious thunderstorm. The wind is rocking us back and forth, and we’re being pummeled by rain, and then shooting the rockets up and inducing lightning bolts. Samaras fires up the Kahuna … and he doesn’t get the shot. Again.

That put you and your  editors in a bind, I’d imagine: What to do?

We decided, this is it. We’ve got to do the story, and we agreed that since he didn’t get the shot, we needed to recast it a little bit, into more of a profile of a man on a noble Quixotic quest. We’re catching him in the middle of what could turn out to be a really, really great breakthrough.

That involved some additional work, and it also involved going from the original size of the story — 3,000 words — down to 2,000 words. This meant losing the scene that I really, really loved where I went to the top of the mountain and spent time alone with the scientists doing rocket-induced lightning.

Let’s back up. Tell me about your reporting process on the road with Samaras.

I got in my Jeep and started driving from Santa Fe to where I was meeting him in this little town called Springer. As I almost got there, the fuel pump on my Jeep went out. A tow truck driver was able to give me a ride up to our rendezvous point at just about the time Samaras was arriving. It worked out perfectly because this way I ended up joining Samaras, riding shotgun for the first few days I was there.

It was so amazing to be riding shotgun with this guy. In his cab he has a computer screen with real-time weather radar, as well as GPS, and he’s looking back and forth between this and the road. He’s looking at the simulated storm on his computer screen, and then out at the real storm. He’s barreling down the blacktop in the panhandle, occasionally reaching up to get his microphone to talk to the car in back of him, and multitasking and taking his glasses on and off to focus on the road or on the screen.

Seems like your Jeep breakdown was probably a boon for your reporting.

That’s where I got all of my best material. I think now if my fuel pump hadn’t gone out and I had been one of the cars following, it just wouldn’t have worked as well. I probably would have quickly realized that and ditched my car somewhere and ridden with him.

What were you doing during that time?

I was sitting next to him in the cab, and talking, interviewing, and writing down what he said. I would write down the back-and-forth banter with the vehicle behind him, and watch the radar screen mounted in his truck cab, and take page after page of notes — and take snapshots of both the blobs on the radar (so I know where they were at different times) and signs by the road in case I need to recreate where I was when something happened.

When you were in the midst of that scene with the cow in the image frame as Samaras was trying to get the lightning shot that first summer, did you recognize it as a starring scene at the time?

There was scene after scene that day, and if I remember right, that was the only time conditions seemed good enough, where lightning was consistently striking at the same place when they actually fired up the Kahuna. But I had taken detailed notes on several earlier scenes during the day in case that didn’t happen.

They were firing up the Kahuna, so I knew that if they got the shot I’d want to have really rich, thick detail. And even if they didn’t, I might end up using this.  It was the first time I was actually seeing the Kahuna working, and the thing with the cow made a nice little aspect of that.

What is your approach to gathering detail for scenes like that?

I just write down everything. I try to keep noticing things, whether it’s sounds or images. In that case, [in the scene with the cow] I was inside a trailer and looking out the back, and I can see the lightning storm, and then I can see Samaras working with all these instruments. He has all these video screens in the trailer so you can see the radar blobs moving across the screen, and you can hear the electronic voice — I call it the Lightning Lady, announcing the proximity of the storm. It was just this glut of information. I was reflexively writing this stuff down, glancing at my watch every few minutes, writing down the time. I had a recorder running as backup, and then I was taking shots and making sure the clock on my camera was set to the right time so I could put this all together if necessary. Of course, you end up with 99 percent more stuff than you actually use.

Did you transcribe all that yourself?

I never really transcribe tapes verbatim. I would go through my handwritten notes and type them up, and then as I did that, I would listen to the recording, and sometimes use that to correct my notes. If something on the recording wasn’t very interesting, I wouldn’t transcribe it, but every once in a while something really good would jump out.

I find, even with formal interviews, it’s not worth the huge amount of time it takes to transcribe the whole thing. I’ll look at my handwritten notes and then listen to the whole tape. A lot of times I’ll end up listening to the tape two or three times and writing down quotes, and where they are on the tape, so I can go back if I want to expand on it and listen to more. But if you listen to the tape that way several times, the really good quotes become stuck in your head, and then you remember them when you’re writing and [you can] go back and check them.

Are there any other lessons that you can pull out of your reporting for this?

It was very different from the kind of story that I usually do, which is done at a much more leisurely pace, where you spend a long time reading papers and books and learning information and going to conferences, and going back and forth to scientists by email, talking to them on the phone. It was very different doing this real “you were there” kind of reporting, which I really enjoy. I hadn’t done a lot of it since I used to cover the police beat for the Albuquerque Journal.

It’s good to do things that you don’t normally do because it sharpens your senses and your writing. I had to do so much throwing out of good stuff in this story. But even though it’s frustrating, it’s not a waste because you learn a lot from writing it, and it sharpens your skills as a writer.

What was your planning process? Did you outline?

I never really outline things, but I knew there were going to be certain scenes and sections. I imagined the story would start describing Samaras driving. That just really struck me, the whole visceral experience.

Then once you do that you feel places where you need to pause and give a little context about what he’s doing, and just slowly fill in the background. You get to the point where so much of it is just serendipity. He said some great thing like, “Whenever the rainbow comes, it’s game over.” That feels like the end of a section. I knew then it’s just natural structure at this point. People have read about this guy, and now you really need to step back and say while you’re there that summer is thunderstorm season in the southwest, and every year for the past blah, blah, blah, and then fan out further and say a little bit about what’s at stake here: the questions about lightning.

Then you’re going to return to the road and pick up with another scene, which is the one where we saw the little tornado, and again, that way we’ve gotten him through an entire day, pausing in the middle to give background.

Originally in section two I take the long drive up to Langmuir Laboratory, and I have a quote from Bill Winn saying, “Tim Samaras chases lightning. We wait for it to come to us.” So I thought, “Nice transition.” I describe going up to the top of the mountain, and sitting there and spending probably a 700 or 800-word scene describing the whole thing. Structurally, this is where I step back even further and talk more generally about the science of lightning and the big questions.

Obviously, you have to return to Samaras in the end. It’s a fairly simple structure, and then he either gets the shot or he doesn’t.

My original ending was [about how] I went to this place in New Mexico called “The Lightning Field,” and it’s an environmental sculpture that was done by the artist Walter De Maria. It’s a square mile of remote land in southern New Mexico, and every couple hundred feet there’s this steel-pointed obelisk. There’s a whole field of hundreds of these things laid out in a grid, and the idea is it’ll attract lightning. But it hardly ever does. I used that as a final scene to contemplate how wonderful it is that we still have these mysteries like lightning. But it was immediately decided that the scene probably was too oblique for the story, so that, along with the Langmuir scene, ended up on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of the cutting room floor, can you say a little about the editing process on this story?

The editor, Jamie Shreeve, was wonderful and had some really good insights, and occasionally I was trying to say something, and an idea would pop into his head of how to do this, and there were a couple places where that was a real help.

Can you think of an example?

There’s a sentence that I really like, at the end of the piece, where I’m describing Samaras, and not getting the shot. Then Jamie said, “Well, this is not going to run in August. That will be during lightning season when people are reading this, and we have to look to the future in a way, even though we don’t know what he’ll be doing.” We don’t want for the future to prove the obvious assumption to be incorrect. So he came up with this really, really nice sentence: “I would be surprised if he isn’t out there now, one eye on the road and the other on a new storm throwing violent colors onto his laptop screen.”

It’s funny: when I read that, I thought, “This just sounds so much like George.”

You know, that’s Jamie Shreeve’s sentence. But when I got that back and I was reading the edit, I thought, “God. That sounds so much like me.”

He must know you well.

I guess so. By this time we had been working on the story for years — I was starting to think of it as, like, my part-time job, doing this article. Anyway, I was very pleased with that line. I don’t think I tweaked a word there.

Is there anything that people wouldn’t know from reading the piece that you would like them to know?

I hope the piece gives the sense that this is a small part of a very large endeavor involving really, really interesting people. One thing I really regretted when I lost that middle section was having more information about Bill Winn, who’s a fascinating character. You could easily do a profile just centered around Bill Winn. Ken Eack was one of the other scientists I worked with, and Elisa Eastvedt was this amazing woman who was down in the bunker shooting these rockets every day. All of them deserve so much more, yet were left on the cutting room floor. I want people to know that there’s so much more out there.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• From the cutting room floor: Two unedited excerpts
• An excerpt of the reporting notes

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Siri Carpenter is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Open Notebook.

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Science is practiced by people, and people never work in isolation. Scientists train their students, who grow up to be scientists in their own right and train students to follow in their own footsteps. Along the way, scientific dynasties emerge, working together to establish new ways of thinking and applying their ideas to new problems. This sociological fact of science gets lost in most journalism, which typically focuses on single pieces of new research.

Ed Yong decided to rectify this wrong with a piece called “Dynasty,” which appeared in the January 17, 2013 issue of Nature. In his article, Yong profiles Robert Paine, an ecologist who in the 1960s changed the way we think about the natural world — and who also trained some of the most influential ecologists of later generations.

Here, Yong talks to TON guest contributor Carl Zimmer about the challenge of the task:

Zimmer: How exactly did you get the idea? Doing an article about a dynasty is unusual as science writing goes. Was this your idea from the start, or did it suddenly morph from something else?

Yong: It was definitely the idea first of doing a dynasty story and looking at the ways scientists influence each other over generations. The idea came from reading a piece by John McPhee. It was a piece of autobiography and talked about some of the stories that he’d written, and one of them was a set of profiles that were all linked by this central character. I read this and thought maybe I could do something similar for science, because science has these chains of academic influence. I thought it might be quite interesting to study that aspect of science, which is so important to the endeavor, but which, as you say, no one ever talks about very much.

I pitched it to Helen Pearson at Nature without really any idea about which dynasty I would look at or who this person would be. It would just be about a chain of scientists. I would definitely recommend not pitching a story for which you have no story idea.

But this one seemed to work. Helen had had the same idea herself, and so we had converged on the same concept. Then it became a matter of finding someone to write about. She came up with the idea of writing about Paul Nurse, because he was very influential. He basically kick-started the use of Saccharomyces pombe [fission yeast] as a model organism. And I thought maybe doing the people who worked on telomeres. They’re quite a rich dynasty and have a couple Nobel Prizes. But both of those families have been written about a lot.

I wanted someone who had a big influence in science, who had an important dynasty, who had interesting stories, but was still alive so I could still interview them, but who hadn’t been written about loads and loads of times before. So that was relatively difficult.

I went to Science Online in 2012 and I was chatting with a few people about this, and Nancy Baron, who runs COMPASS, said, “Hey you could write something about Bob Paine.” I had never heard of him.

Nancy told me about his work and said, “This is the guy who came up with keystone species” — that is, species that are disproportionately influential in its environment. So I pitched that idea to Helen and she liked it. And that was when we finally had a story and not a nebulous concept.

So did you immediately call up Paine and say you wanted to write a profile of him, or did you skirt around and talk to other people before you approached him?

I decided to call Bob first to make sure that he would be amenable to the idea and that he would be a good interview. I didn’t know him, and if he turned out to be really dull and uncommunicative it wouldn’t work.

So I had a chat with him in March 2012 and it worked out really well. He’s a natural storyteller and he has very strong but interesting views, and he’s clearly done a lot for ecology. We had a quick chat to get a few details down and talk about what he thought his influence might be.

I knew that he was going to a conference for the Ecological Society of America in August, so I arranged to meet him there. I also knew a lot of his students were going to be there at the same time, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to have a chat. In the intervening months I started reading his research and his students’ research, but also talking to as many people as possible — his students, close colleagues, old friends. Just to get a sense of what his influence was.

You say Paine had these great stories. Was there one particular story that he launched into when you were on the phone?

The starfish story was the obvious one because that’s the one that led to the idea of keystone species in the first place. This is the one with him on the coast of Washington, he’s a newly minted professor, and he’s trying to find the ecosystem that he really wants to work on. He finds rocky shorelines, and he falls in love with them. He starts looking around and playing around, and he sees these starfish and wonders what would happen if he removed them.

So he starts prising up these starfish and just throwing them into the sea. He complete denudes this piece of coastline. What happens is that the beach slowly gets invade by barnacles and then by mussels. And the entire community changes. Rather than this dense network of life with starfish predating on these other creatures, you have a mussel monopoly.

It’s such a lovely image of this guy throwing these starfish into the sea and coming up with this idea that’s now central to ecology. I think I knew right from then it was going to be the lead. That’s the start of Paine’s story and his dynasty.

I wanted to get his friends and associates to talk about him, but it could end up sounding a bit thin. They would say he was very supportive, but that’s telling me, not showing me. Getting people to come up with stories in greater detail about what he was like was quite hard. The most common reaction was, “Ah, it’s very hard to remember because it was a long while back.” It would slowly snowball into a coherent picture of what he was actually like.

Did you have a moment when you thought, “Oh my God, I’m not going to have any good stories here?” Did you start to question this whole idea?

Yeah, there were times when I worried it wasn’t quite working. Before I went to the conference, it felt like it might end up being a bit puffy. It was just going to be a straight bio of what he did. What changed at the conference was getting a lot of face time with him and a lot of face time with his students as well.

Jane Lubchenco was particularly interesting and helpful. At the time she was the head of NOAA and a big government official who was well trained in ecology. And from her, I got my first taste of proper conflict in the family. Her work on policy was quite rebellious. It was quite different from what Paine’s interests were in terms of basic science.

This conflict really gave a center to the piece. It added a narrative drive, because it showed his ideas progressing — staying true to his ideals but also challenging his viewpoints and taking them in new directions.

Can you guess how many people you talked to in total?

Between 15 and 20, something like that.

So you come home from this meeting. Are you ready to write?

Yeah, the story structured itself pretty easily. It’s a chronological tale, and I knew I wanted three generations. I had an easy chain there, and I knew I wanted to do them in order. That just seemed to make sense. I just started writing, and it flowed reasonably well.

But because I was writing about three generations of work, it was an absolute bitch to find all these old, old papers and go through them. I had this sinking feeling all the time that I’d read all these papers for two hours so I could write one paragraph for this story — which I’m about to cut.

Did you look at any articles or books as models or guides as you were working the piece?

I remember loading up my iPad with a lot of really good profiles I had read recently and mainlining them on the flight over to Portland.  I definitely remember panic-reading really good profiles and holding the iPad up to my head, hoping that some of that would osmose across.

I had no idea if someone had written something like this before. A few people had written short pieces about small parts of the story. But I hadn’t read anything specifically about dynasties. Only really close to the end of writing did I find out that Robert Kanigel had written an entire book that was basically about a dynasty. He’d look at these guys at MIT who had founded the field of drug metabolism.

I spoke to Robert, and that was really useful. The MIT dynasty that he looked at was very different than the Paine one. The MIT experience was quite similar to my experience in academia, which was quite competitive. The mentors would make their students do their own projects, and they would tell the students what to do. Which provided a really nice contrast with what Paine did, which was to send them off to different parts of this rocky island and look at nature and come up with their own ideas. He was supportive and didn’t make students compete with each other, and he even kept his name off of papers where he didn’t think he contributed significantly to the work. Talking to Kanigel to get this picture of this very different dynasty was a nice way to end the piece — by saying that Paine shows the opposite approach can work.

The idea of a dynasty can seem kind of abstract to people who aren’t scientists. But you had this island where Paine worked for decades, this physical place, to anchor your story to. Did you think about that? Did you consciously deploy it?

I knew I wanted the island to be a character early on. (I sound like I’m writing Lost.)  If it was just going to be 2,000 words about a dynasty, it would be people saying, “Oh, yeah, I learned a lot and he was really supportive,” and it would be really boring.

The island provided a vivid setting, and it grounded what these students got from Paine. They would go out to study barnacles or fish or whatever and come back to the campfire to trade data. They would get challenged by their boss and they would go to sleep in these old abandoned garages to the sound of sea gulls screaming.

When I first talked to Paine, I had in mind that I would probably need to go to the island and see what it was like. And he basically said, “No.” It’s treacherous to get to and very expensive. So no trip to the island. But I didn’t think the story needed it. I didn’t need to describe exactly how rocky it was.

Now that you’ve finished the piece, do you think this is going to influence how you write in the future? Are you going to write more dynasty pieces, or pieces that are different in one way or another from standard science writing?

I think it was a massively useful writing experience. I learned a lot about doing fairly basic tricks of the trade. I don’t know about doing more dynasty pieces. I still love it as a concept. One thing this piece proves to me is that it’s a difficult thing to pull off. It’s totally contingent on finding the right people. I don’t know how it would have gone with a different group of people.

On the Nature web site, there’s a comment on the piece that says, “This would be a lovely book.” There’s probably some truth in that, but I think in this piece I’ve told the story I want to tell. I think if you went all out with it, it might be a book, but equally it might end up being a bit list-y. Here’s a guy, and here’s another guy, and here’s another guy, and here’s what they all did. I think it works nicely as a tighter chain, so you’re exploring one path of branches and twigs rather than the whole tree.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Email exchanges between Yong and his editor
• Story Outline

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Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer has written about science for the New York Times since 2004. He also writes frequently for magazines such as Wired and National Geographic, which hosts his blog, “The Loom.” He has also written 12 books, including Parasite Rex and Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Maryn McKenna

Science journalist Maryn McKenna has covered the infectious diseases beat for more than a decade. During that time, she’s written countless articles and two award-winning books on the subject. Through her reporting, she developed an interest in how large-scale farming operations spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Last year, McKenna produced a package of stories on women who had contracted antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections from chickens carrying resistant E. coli. She created the project in collaboration with the Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN) — an independent, non-profit news organization that produces investigative journalism on food, agriculture, and environmental health. The stories landed on a single day last July in The Atlantic, ABC News, and Good Morning America, and on McKenna’s Wired blog, Superbug.

Here, McKenna tells TON co-executive editor Jeanne Erdmann the story behind the story:

You mentioned during an interview with NPR that you first learned about the potential human health risks posed by large-scale agriculture back in in 2006. What tipped your interest in this problem?

A couple of things happened. First, when I started reporting the book Superbug in 2006 (the book came out in 2010), I learned that in 2004 scientists had noticed a new type of the resistant bug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which had previously been a hospital and community problem but now was arising in animals and moving to humans, and was detectable because of a resistance signature from a particular antibiotic. So that got me interested in the topic.

I signed a contract for Superbug in early 2007, and I wanted to bring attention to the book both before and after publication, and to attach my name to the topic. So I started a blog, which was also called Superbug, and which is now at Wired.com. In starting the blog, I assigned myself the task of constantly surveying the scientific literature and news from around the world, to see what was surfacing about antibiotic resistance, and then pushing what I discovered out to an audience who might not have time to survey that landscape. In return, I wanted readers to help crowdsource my research, by talking to me about what they knew about antibiotic resistance. In the process of doing that, I started finding papers about the impact of antibiotic use in agriculture, and whether that was causing resistant organisms to cross to humans.

Then, after the book came out in paperback in 2011, I realized I wanted to talk more about the topic. I felt I had a lot to say about the control of antibiotic resistance in hospitals and the community, but the agricultural side felt under-investigated. I decided to make myself into a food policy reporter, by exploring and covering the topic more. On blogs, the only gauge of whether you are having an impact is your audience’s reaction. So I started trying to write about the intersection of antibiotic use and livestock-raising, and the potential impact on human health, and discovered lots of people are interested in this.

How did you connect with the Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN)?

Once I got into the topic, I discovered there was an existing community of food-policy writers, some of whom were former mainstream-media people, some who had always been blogging or writing online, and some who are activists. I met in some in real life, and others electronically, particularly on Twitter. It was out of those relationships that I met the people who had begun FERN, which was getting established at the same time. I thought what they were doing sounded intriguing and I wanted to be part of it.

How did you interest FERN in this project?

One of the challenges in writing about antibiotic resistance is that infections occur in people who are already sick. The main victims tend to be people already in the ICU, or older, or undergoing chemotherapy; it’s hard to get a general audience to identify with victims like that because they think, “I’m not elderly,” or, “I don’t have a chronic disease,” or “I’m not in an ICU.” But UTIs are something that affects that general audience; I don’t know a woman who has never had a UTI. To my delight, the FERN people said that it would be something that would fit their model — a story very grounded in evidence, and one that would have wide audience appeal so they could broker it to their mainstream partners.

How does FERN work?

The idea behind FERN is that it seeks, within a particular topic space, to help reporters do stories that maybe 20 years ago would have been done on a project team at big newspapers. In newspapers (where I used to work, as a project reporter) you have a group of people who are doing deep-dive stories, and the project editor makes sure those stories are brokered to the rest of the newspaper — so they get on the front page, or get support from a particular section editor.  What FERN does is kind of replace the project editor. So you pitch them an idea, and if they see deep-dive potential they write a contract, so you are contracted with FERN. Then they broker the idea to big media outlets, TV, radio, the web, and so on.

Depending on the complexity of the project sometimes they are just a pass-through and you are actually being paid by the outlet where your work is going. In my case, because my investigation was going to several outlets, I got paid by FERN rather than being paid by Atlantic or by ABC News. FERN has a stronger network that I do individually, as a freelancer. Though I’ve written for Scientific American, Self, More and Wired, I’ve never sold anything to the Atlantic, so they extended my network by having contacts that I don’t have.

How did you pitch the story?

Usually they ask for pitches to come through their website, at most a few hundred words. But I had already met them and knew what they were interested in.  I met Sam [Samuel Fromartz, FERN’s founder and editor-in-chief] at a conference in the fall of 2011, and I earlier had asked executive director Tom Laskawy to be on a panel with me at the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) meeting in Philadelphia. So I had been building the relationships for a while without knowing where they would lead.

In the beginning of 2012 another paper came out, the latest in this ongoing investigation of drug-resistant E. coli, and whether the resistance could be assigned to antibiotic use in chickens. I said to the FERN folks, “Look, I’ve been keeping track of the literature for a few years now, and given this most recent paper, I think there’s a story burgeoning here that hasn’t been covered yet.” Because we already had that contact I could describe things in an email, and then we had a phone call, and then I wrote a series of pitch memos for them. I feel incredibly fortunate that they took my pitch.

What happened next?

Thankfully FERN was correct that this was a story their mainstream media partners would see as worthwhile. They went to ABC News, who said yes. At first, it was just going to be a piece for Good Morning America, scripted by ABC News from a mix of my and their reporting. But then Sam Fromartz said there was more to this, so he also took it to The Atlantic and proposed it to them as a story written by me that would be richer and longer. And then once ABC got into it, and also realized how rich the story was, they decided to do a second package. We ended up with a morning piece of about one-and-a-half minutes on Good Morning America, an evening piece of about two-and-a-half minutes on World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer, a story on ABC’s website, and a 1,500-word piece on the Atlantic website — all of which I then summarized and put on my own blog with links to all the rest. That we were in different outlets meant we were reaching different audiences. And then other media picked it up, which was very gratifying. It’s a model that FERN has subsequently used on other stories.

Because this story crossed so many media platforms, what were the challenges in reporting?

This story kind of crossed a couple of different genres. On the one hand, it was a deep dive into the literature, and was a scientific-evidence story, but on the other hand, it was kind of a classic magazine service piece for which we had to go out and canvass for real victims. I actually had different victims in the Atlantic piece and the ABC News piece. For some of them, ABC News helped because they have a network of doctors whom they contact regularly. We went to those doctors and talked to them as expert sources and asked if they had any patients we could contact, but I also did a bunch more beating the bushes, and putting out all kinds of networking to find additional victims for the Atlantic piece.

Even though UTIs are so common, it was surprisingly hard to get people to go public about it, particularly for women, whom UTI affects most often. If you talk about UTIs, almost inevitably you are talking about sex because it’s often sex that makes women more vulnerable. So it was harder to get women to talk, compared with other disease stories I have done.

This project sounds like it took a lot of time. Did the money from FERN make the investment worthwhile?

Yeah. It’s another reason I’m grateful to FERN.  One difficulty of writing for big magazines, particularly if you are doing anything investigative or narrative, is that you have to do so much research before you see any money. It’s a real barrier to accomplishing those kind of complex stories. But FERN’s grants allow them to give writers pitch funding, essentially small research grants, in advance of the story being sold. It makes it possible to produce the kind of pitch a big magazine requires, which is often several iterations of a 1,000 to 1,500-word memo, without making a financial sacrifice. That was a huge help with these stories in particular, because I needed complete transcripts to assemble the portfolio for ABC— so I was able to send all the interviews off to a professional transcriptionist while I continued to report. A little-discussed aspect of big-magazine reporting is that, at the start of a story, you are more financially invested than the magazine is, because you are spending your time and effort long before they begin to pay you. This time, for maybe the first time in my magazine work, I was breaking even from the start.

Craft-wise, what lessons did you learn from this project?

A couple of things. I have never been a TV person, not even a radio person, but to make this successful I had to report as if I were. I had to report in a traditional print-reporter manner to get material for the written story for The Atlantic, but I also had to essentially give ABC News a portfolio of all of the pieces of the story, which they could then draw on to choose the best victim stories, and to decide where to go for their best shot to make a good video story. So what we gave ABC News was not a story written by me, but a portfolio: sound files, complete transcripts, all the medical literature, and a long story memo. Out of that, they generated their video stories, and then out of their video, generated a written story.

When I say I had to report in two different ways, I mean that I had to get what I needed for my own story, but also had to attend to the mechanics: I had to make sure I had good sound files and good transcripts, and make sure I was writing a good memo that was not a story in itself, but a description about where their story might go. The lesson I learned out of this wasn’t really about excellence in writing, or even excellence in story organization, but rather understanding how many different things you have to do to make a story into a multi-platform piece. So many reporters are asked to do that now: Editors ask, “Do you have a slide show?” Or, “could you have video?” Or, “Is there some other point of entry you can offer?” It gave me a taste of what that feels like.

What did this feel like?

It’s a lot of work.

Do you think you’ll do another project like this (FERN project) again? And if so, would you do anything differently?

Actually, we’ve been working on another project together since shortly after this package was published: another deep-dive, big-think magazine piece, which may or may not have a multi-media component. This one has also required a lot of up-front work, so I’m once again grateful to FERN for being willing to invest that pitch-research funding.

What’s next for you?

Like a lot of writers (I think), I did an end-of-year assessment of what I published in 2012, and wasn’t thrilled with what I saw; I’d paid the bills, for sure, but aside from the FERN package there wasn’t too much I was proud of. So my 2013 goal is to focus on projects that will be bigger than, and different from, what I’ve done before. As part of that, I’m polishing a proposal for my next book, which will look at the twin histories of antibiotic development and modern agriculture — but I’m hoping this next FERN project will be a big achievement in the coming year as well.

A glimpse behind the scenes:

• Email to FERN editor with first mention
• UTI-chickens pitch

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Jeanne Erdmann is co-founder and co-executive editor of TON. She is a freelance science journalist in Missouri.

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